LINGUIST List 14.514

Thu Feb 20 2003

Confs: Processing and Acquisition of Reference

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. pearlmutter, Processing and Acquisition of Reference, MA USA

Special Session on the Processing and Acquisition of Reference

Location: Cambridge, MA, United States of America 
Date: 28-Mar-2003 - 28-Mar-2003 
Web Site: http://tedlab.mit.edu/CUNY2003/
Contact Person: Neal Pearlmutter
Meeting Email: cunytedlab.mit.edu
Linguistic Subfield(s): Psycholinguistics 

This is a session of the following conference:
16th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing


Meeting Description: 

There will be a special session entitled, The Processing and
Acquisition of Reference, to be held on Friday March 28, in
conjunction with the conference. There will be a special session
entitled, The Processing and Acquisition of Reference, to be held on
Friday March 28, in conjunction with the conference.

The goal of this special session is to help connect the fields of
language acquisition and language processing. Linguistic reference is
particularly well-suited to connecting the fields of acquisition and
processing because (1) it is being actively examined from a linguistic
and a psycholinguistic perspective; (2) it has already begun to be
studied in both children and adults; and (3) it is particularly
amenable to investigation using recently developed head-mounted
eye-tracking methods (Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Trueswell et al., 1999),
which have enabled use of identical designs with children and adults,
and direct investigation of the referential process. The special
session will therefore concentrate on the processing and acquisition
of reference.

The special session will focus on four primary themes: (1) The
semantics and pragmatics of reference in linguistic theory; (2)
Psycholinguistic theories of reference from the sentence and discourse
processing literature; (3) The acquisition of reference and
referential constraints by children; and (4) The use of lightweight
head-mounted eye-trackers as an important new method for investigating
reference in both adults and children.

Invited Speakers

 * Stephen Crain (University of Maryland, College Park)
 * Simon Garrod (University of Glasgow)
 * Irene Heim (MIT)
 * Tanya Reinhart (Tel Aviv University, Utrecht University)
 * Julie Sedivy (Brown University)
 * John Trueswell (University of Pennsylvania)
 * Ken Wexler (MIT)