The Department of Linguistics, the Department of Psychology, and Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan recently hosted the prestigious Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 2024 conference, organized by Julie Boland, Jon Brennan, Lisa Levinson, Rick Lewis, and Savithry Namboodiripad.
This annual gathering of scholars and researchers in the field of linguistics is renowned for its cutting-edge presentations and vibrant academic discourse. This year's conference was no exception, featuring groundbreaking presentations and insightful posters. A special highlight was the NSF-funded session titled “Socially Situated Language Processing.” This session focused on the integration of social information into language processing in comprehension, production, and acquisition. It explored how theories, questions, and methodologies from sociolinguistics and social psychology can inform and be informed by research on language processing.
Main Presentations:
The University of Michigan's faculty, students, and alumni made significant contributions to the conference, showcasing their latest research and innovative ideas. Explore the full program from the 2024 LSA Annual Meeting.
Here are some of the highlights:
Andrew McInnerney - “Emergence of island effects in causal vs. masked language model training.”
Jeonghwa Cho, Harim Kwon - “Perceptual adaptation to novel speech patterns differs by talker identity.”
Jungyun Seo, Ruaridh Purse, Jelena Krivokapić - “The effect of speech planning and prosodic structure in speech production: How do planning and prosodic structure interact?”
Janet Dean Fodor Memorial Workshop
Another highlight was the NSF-funded Janet Dean Fodor Memorial Workshop, supported by the NSF. Janet Dean Fodor, an influential psycholinguist who passed away in 2023, was honored through this workshop. Janet's contributions to linguistic representations, sentence processing, and language acquisition were immense. She was pivotal in establishing the CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, now known as the Human Sentence Processing Conference. The workshop featured presentations from many of her former mentees and main collaborators and was open to all conference attendees. Explore the full program of the workshop.
