FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: joint meeting of CSDL and ESLP

[Benjamin Bergen]

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Joint meeting of:

The Conceptual Structure Discourse, and Language Conference (CSDL)
and
The Embodied and Situated Language Processing Workshop (ESLP)

San Diego, California
September 16-19, 2010.
http://embodiedlanguage.org/csdl_eslp.html

Keynote Speakers:

  Michael Arbib, USC
  Lera Boroditsky, Stanford University
  Craig Chambers, UTM
  Matthew Crocker, U Saarbruecken
  Vic Ferreira, UC San Diego
  Adele Goldberg, Princeton
  George Lakoff, UC Berkeley
  Teenie Matlock, UC Merced
  Fey Parrill, Case Western
  Gabriella Vigliocco, University College London
  Rolf Zwaan, University of Rotterdam

Submissions:

We welcome submissions of abstracts for oral or poster presentations on topics 
related to language and cognition, including but not limited to embodiment, 
situatedness, language use, figurative language, grammatical constructions, 
gesture, comprehension, production, and learning. Successful submissions will 
address theoretically important issues using appropriate empirical methods, 
such as linguistic analysis, corpus analysis, computational modeling, 
behavioral experimentation, electrophysiology, and brain imaging.

Abstracts can now be submitted electronically, and must be submitted by the 
deadline of April 30, 2010. They will be reviewed anonymously by expert 
reviewers, and authors will be notified with decisions by early June, 2010.

Support for students:

Through National Science Foundation support, the meeting is able to provide up 
to $250 in funding to support travel costs and registration fees for 25 
students participating in this meeting. Students may request to be considered 
for support using the form to appear on the meeting's website. Reviews of 
abstract submissions will be entirely independent of and unaffected by requests 
for support.

Schedule:

The goal of this joint meeting is to foster interdisciplinary interactions. To 
this end, the first day of the meeting (September 16th) will feature tutorials 
on "Experimental and Computational Research Methods for Cognitive Linguists" 
and "Cognitive Linguistics Research for Experimentalists". These will be taught 
by the invited speakers and are intended to provide basic familiarity with the 
tools, vocabulary, and practices of the relevant disciplines. More details on 
the tutorial topics will become available on the website.

Research presentations will start on the afternoon of September 16th and run 
through the afternoon of September 19th in a single-session format. Aside from 
the keynote speakers, there will be competitive slots for 20-minute oral 
presentations as well as poster sessions.

About the meeting:

CSDL, the biennial meeting of the North American branch of the International 
Cognitive Linguistics Association, was first held in San Diego in 1994. 
Cognitive Linguistics is the cover term for a collection of approaches to 
language that focus heavily on the "embodiment" of language. Under the rubric 
of embodiment, cognitive linguists investigate the extent to which form depends 
on meaning, function, and use, as well as ways in which language use depends on 
non-linguistic neurocognitive systems. (For more on previous CSDLs: 
http://www.cogling.org/csdlconfs.shtml)

ESLP 2010 is the third event in a workshop series that started in 2007. The 
first goal of the conference is to bring together researchers working on the 
interaction of language and visual/motor processing in embodied, situated, and 
language-for-action research traditions. A further focus is on uniting 
converging and complementary evidence from three different methods (behavioral, 
neuropsychological, and computational). The first meeting led to the 
publication of a special issue on embodied language processing in Brain and 
Language (to appear in March 2010). ESLP took place again in June, 2009 in 
Rotterdam, in association with the international Cognitive Science Society 
Conference in Amsterdam (see http://embodiedlanguage.org/).

This meeting brings together two populations of researchers - cognitive 
linguists on the one hand and psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists 
studying embodied and situated language processing on the other. There are 
substantial gains to be made by bringing these two communities together. They 
share an interest in investigating how language and its structure depend upon 
situated use and embodied cognition, but differ in their methods and many of 
their assumptions.

Cognitive linguists typically use traditional methods of linguistic analysis 
(corpus methods, elicitation, native speaker judgments) to develop nuanced and 
theoretically sophisticated accounts of how language is embodied how language 
structure depends upon constraints imposed by known properties of the human 
brain and body. They additionally focus on how language use affects language 
structure and language change.

The ESLP community (psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists) 
typically use experimental and computational methods to ask questions about the 
cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying linguistic embodiment, and about the 
neural and cognitive mechanisms when language is processed in its grounded 
physical and social contexts situatedness.

For more information, please consult the meeting website: 
http://embodiedlanguage.org/csdl_eslp.html. If you have further questions, 
please contact the conference organizers, Ben Bergen (UCSD) and Pia Knoeferle 
(Bielefeld University), at csdl.eslp at gmail.com.



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  Benjamin K. Bergen

  Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Science
  University of California, San Diego
  bkbergen at ucsd.edu
  http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/

  Director, Language and Cognition Lab
  http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bergen/lcl/

  Associate Editor, Cognitive Linguistics
  http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/
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