Joint meeting of Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (CSDL) & Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP)

[Benjamin Bergen]

Registration is now open for the joint meeting of:

The Conceptual Structure Discourse, and Language conference (CSDL)

and

The Embodied and Situated Language Processing workshop (ESLP)


UC San Diego
La Jolla, California
September 16-19, 2010.
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/pknoeferle/csdl_eslp/home.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


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 "Cognitive Linguistics for experimentalists and
computationalists" and "Experimental and computational methods for cognitive
linguists". 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 are available on
the conference website under 'schedule'

Research presentations begin on the morning of September 17th and run
through the afternoon of September 19th in a single-session format. The full
list of invited, oral, and poster presentations can be found here:
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/pknoeferle/csdl_eslp/schedule_files/csdl_eslp%202010_program.pdf


Registration

Registration is now open!
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/pknoeferle/csdl_eslp/registration_.html


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 and on language
use. 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 joint 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://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/pknoeferle/csdl_eslp/home.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.