Conference: Investigating Research on the Acquisition and Processing of Diverse Languages

When communicating with their conversational partners, speakers rapidly and flexibly comprehend and produce language across a variety of situational contexts. These abilities develop early in children regardless of whether they are acquiring one, or multiple, languages and–with training–extend to reading and writing as well. But because sounds, words, grammars, and meanings can vary widely across languages, speakers of different languages face distinct learning and processing challenges.

The strategies that speakers use to meet these challenges can provide novel insights into the flexibility and creativity of language and cognition in humans. Thus, it is critical to investigate diverse languages and populations to accomplish the fundamental goal of psycholinguistics: to understand the mechanisms that enable the remarkable feats of language acquisition and processing in speakers of any human language.

This conference brings together psycholinguists investigating diverse languages to highlight and stimulate research in linguistic and cognitive diversity. The regions in which these diverse languages are used come from a variety of language families and have certain key characteristics that distinguish them from many other, well-studied, languages. These diverse languages are also represented by multiple writing systems, and the populations speaking these languages are typically multilingual, with many children being exposed to multiple languages and scripts during their school years.

Speakers of these languages encounter a variety of linguistic experiences whose impacts on the development, representation, and processing of language are not yet accommodated by current theories. The conference highlights cutting-edge research by leading scholars that investigates these diverse linguistic experiences, focusing on four key themes: first language acquisition, language processing, multilingualism, and literacy.

The conference also aims to inspire young scholars to conduct psycholinguistic research from a crosslinguistic perspective by encouraging graduate students and early career researchers to submit their work and participate in the conference. Two tutorial presentations targeting this audience are delivered by influential experts on the documentation of child language in diverse communities and the processing of language in children with typical and atypical development.

Research on the impacts of diversity on the mechanisms of development and processing also has ramifications beyond basic science, for instance, in clinical interventions, human-computer interface design, education policy, and classroom practice. Therefore, conference activities include dissemination of research presented at the conference to the wider community through a peer-reviewed journal special issue.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.