Diversity in conference in Japan

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  Regarding the issue of diversity in the newly-formed Japanese Society for
Language Sciences, I would like to point to a very positive related aspect of
this new society.  This is the extent to which the organizers of this group
have worked proactively to encourage participation from diverse academic
groups interested in language acquisition.  In particular, the first annual
meeting had a good inclusion of people from Linguistics, Psychology,
Education, Second Language Acquisition, and Speech Sciences.  I was very much
impressed by the quality of the work presented and the extent to which
researchers from different disciplines expressed interest in each other's
methods and approaches.  About half of the papers were presented in English
and about half in Japanese.  I understand zero Japanese, but there were
abstracts in English for the papers presented in Japanese and it was usually
easy to follow along.  I think that the organizers should be commended for
their success in terms of achieving intellectual quality and disciplinary
diversity.  The logistics of traveling to Japan may make it unlikely that
non-Japanese will attend in great numbers, but if they do manage to attend, I
think they will find this meeting quite rewarding.

--Brian MacWhinney