Conference: Socially Situated Language Processing: Special Sessions at the Human Sentence Processing 2024 Conference

Research on how people produce and understand language has usually focused on situations with little social context, such as reading paragraphs and answering questions in highly controlled settings. But humans use language in an immense variety of social situations with others who differ from each other in factors like age, race/ethnicity, social class and more. These factors affect how humans use language. This award supports a special session at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Human Sentence Processing (SHSP) that brings together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and computer scientists to uncover how the human mind makes sense of language in socially rich and diverse situations. SHSP is a premiere scientific organization for the study of the mental processes involved in language use, and this special session helps to attract a more diverse set of scholars to the field—scholars whose participation is crucial for advancing this exciting science. The session is anchored by keynote presentations addressing questions such as: How does social information influence language understanding, production, and acquisition? How can language processing researchers engage more directly with language as it is practiced by and between socially diverse communities? These and other activities broaden the impact of sentence processing research by linking cognitive mechanisms, such as predictive processing and memory retrieval, with new perspectives from more natural and diverse contexts. The session promotes an expansion of the language varieties and language communities under investigation, including minoritized varieties that are only beginning to receive attention in language processing research. These efforts facilitate interdisciplinary training for junior scientists attending the conference through travel grants and outreach efforts to minority-serving institutions. The special session also contributes to broadening diversity in the STEM pipeline; centering research in diverse communities promotes the research of diverse scholars, attracts more diverse students, and offers opportunities for collaborations between scholars of different backgrounds. 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.