Workshop on Language Processing and Language Evolution: Special Session at the 2017 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

语言处理和语言进化研讨会：2017 年纽约市立大学人类句子处理会议特别会议

• 批准号: 1629983
• 负责人: Edward Gibson
• 金额: $ 4.25万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1629983&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Workshop; Language; Processing; Evolution; Special

It is a central goal of the field of linguistics to characterize the process by which the human brain links the forms of language with some representation of meaning--a process unique to humans. Understanding this process has practical value in a world where language barriers and foreign language learning are increasingly important, where new media and new forms of language use (for example, as on the Internet) play an increasingly large role, and where algorithms that seek to bestow computers with understanding of human languages are proliferating and have increasing impact on day-to-day life. Within the field of psycholinguistics, the most common approach is to take languages as given and to study the processes by which humans comprehend and produce utterances in those languages. Here, using ideas from functional linguistics, quantitative typology, and evolution, workshop participants will explore the reverse approach. Taking some knowledge of human information processing as given, participants will examine systematic differences among languages, variation among grammatical constructions within languages, and the diachronic emergence and development of language structures. Using this evolutionary view of language, presenters will discuss novel hypotheses about the relationships between processing and linguistic structure, and shed new light on how human language operates both within speakers and over time. This project is for a special conference session, Language Processing and Language Evolution, to be held in conjunction with the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference is the premier event in North America for scientists interested in how humans comprehend and produce language. The conference regularly receives well over 300 abstracts for roughly 35 oral presentation slots and 150 poster slots. Approximately 400 scientists (faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students) attend the conference as audience members and presenters. Conference attendees come from all over the United States and Canada, and from Europe, Australia, East Asia and Latin America. The conference has been remarkably successful as an interdisciplinary forum, drawing researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, neuroscience, and philosophy. The special session is designed to extend our current knowledge of language processing by providing a richer characterization of the linguistic systems that humans learn and use, from the perspective of models of language evolution: how these linguistic systems got to be the way they are. Workshop participants will explore how human languages have and have not been shaped by information processing constraints. The ultimate goal is to create a more realistic and representative picture of diversity among languages and of how the human mind represents and processes those languages.

语言学领域的一个中心目标是描述人脑将语言形式与某种意义表示联系起来的过程——这是人类独有的过程。在当今世界，语言障碍和外语学习变得越来越重要，新媒体和新的语言使用形式（例如在互联网上）发挥着越来越大的作用，并且算法寻求解决问题，理解这一过程具有实用价值。赋予计算机理解人类语言的能力正在激增，并对日常生活产生越来越大的影响。在心理语言学领域，最常见的方法是将语言视为给定的，并研究人类理解和产生这些语言的话语的过程。在这里，研讨会参与者将利用功能语言学、定量类型学和进化论的思想来探索相反的方法。根据人类信息处理的一些知识，参与者将研究语言之间的系统差异、语言内语法结构的变化以及语言结构的历时出现和发展。利用这种语言进化论的观点，演讲者将讨论有关处理和语言结构之间关系的新假设，并为人类语言在说话者内部和随着时间的推移如何运作提供新的见解。该项目是为了与第 30 届纽约市立大学人类句子处理年会同期举行的特别会议“语言处理和语言进化”而举办。对于对人类如何理解和产生语言感兴趣的科学家来说，纽约市立大学人类句子处理会议是北美的首要活动。会议定期收到 300 多份摘要，用于大约 35 个口头报告时段和 150 个海报时段。大约 400 名科学家（教师、博士后、研究生和本科生）作为观众和演讲者参加了会议。会议与会者来自美国和加拿大各地，以及欧洲、澳大利亚、东亚和拉丁美洲。作为一个跨学科论坛，该会议非常成功，吸引了来自语言学、心理学、计算机科学、教育、神经科学和哲学领域的研究人员。这次特别会议旨在通过从语言进化模型的角度提供人类学习和使用的语言系统的更丰富的特征来扩展我们当前的语言处理知识：这些语言系统如何成为现在的样子。研讨会参与者将探讨人类语言如何受到或不受到信息处理限制的影响。最终目标是创建一个更现实和更具代表性的语言多样性图景以及人类思维如何表示和处理这些语言。