Registration for this event is required by October 3rd, 2019. (Registration is free for Yale/Haskins affiliates.)
More information, including a link to register and the full program of events, is at the conference webpage.
Description: The connections between meanings and the pronunciations through which they are linguistically conveyed vary systematically within a speech community and change systematically over time. Many synchronic and diachronic patterns that instantiate such dynamics have been well described, yet the cognitive and communicative forces that support them—including their discourse-based, linguistic, conceptual, and cognitive components—remain poorly understood. The focus of this conference is to bring together researchers working on one or more of these facets with the aim of connecting development, variation, and change.
We invite abstracts for talks at the intersection of semantics/pragmatics, information/discourse structure, phonetics/phonology (of spoken and signed languages), language variation, language change, and language and cognitive development. We highly encourage submissions presenting in-progress results, covering not only connections between existing analyses and cognitively-grounded explanatory models but also the methodological challenges that arise.
Specifically, in this workshop we would like to address the following questions:
(a) to what extent are trajectories of meaning-pronunciation dynamics construable as dynamics that emerge from and are guided by real-time implementation of the architecture of language and the larger cognitive system?
(b) how are the actuation and propagation of these dynamics driven by discourse context and other communicative constraints?
(c) how are the causal relations between the arcs of acquisition/development and change in meaning-pronunciations informed by processing constraints?
We are planning this very much as a retreat, with discussion driven by foundational questions on meaning -pronunciation development, variation, and change, as well as the struggle of messy data. We are seeking to bring together all kinds of perspectives on meaning and phonetics/phonology representation, as well as all experimental and empirical approaches, as exemplified by our invited speakers.
Confirmed invited speakers:
Susan Carey, Harvard U. Psychology
Herbert Clark, Stanford U. Psychology
Jennifer Cole, Northwestern U. Linguistics
Veneeta Dayal, Yale U. Linguistics
Joy Hirsch, Haskins Labs/Yale U. Psychiatry and Neurobiology
