36.2988, Confs: 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (USA)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2988. Mon Oct 06 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2988, Confs: 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (USA)

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Date: 05-Oct-2025
From: Edward Gibson [eafgibson at gmail.com]
Subject: 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing


39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing
Short Title: HSP
Theme: Language and thought in minds and machines

Date: 26-Mar-2026 - 28-Mar-2026
Location: Cambridge, USA
Contact: Edward Gibson
Contact Email: info at hsp2026.org
Meeting URL: https://hsp2026.org/

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
General Linguistics; Neurolinguistics; Psycholinguistics

Submission Deadline: 12-Dec-2025

The primary research focus of the annual Human Sentence Processing
conference is on the cognitive processes underlying our ability to
understand and produce the words and sentences in a human language.
The proposed special session will explore the interface between this
linguistic ability and the human capacity for abstract thought. This
is an age-old question from the philosophy and psychology literature,
ranging from ideas from Plato, Wittgenstein, and Chomsky in philosophy
to proposals from Sapir, Whorf and Levinson in the linguistics
literature. Some of the key questions that will be discussed in the
special session include: Are language and thought supported by the
same or distinct cognitive and brain systems? Is complex thought
possible without language? How does learning a language
affect/increase our cognitive abilities across development and in
adulthood? Does knowledge of different languages change how we think
about the world? How do different cognitive capacities, especially
social cognition, affect patterns of language use? Do the impressive
linguistic abilities of modern computational systems, like ChatGPT,
imply that these models can reason? Given the rise of AI language
models (LLMs), both in cognitive science research and broader society,
there is a need to better understand whether, and if so how, these
models can inform psycholinguistic research, and to bring together
researchers spanning the range of opinions on this question. The HSP
community is especially well positioned to weigh in on how LLMs are
and aren't like humans in how they learn and how they process
language, and this proposed special session can facilitate future
contributions of HSP researchers to these discussions, especially as
it relates to the question of the distinction between language and
thought. The HSP conference has historically hosted productive
dialogue regarding the relative merits of neural network versus
symbolic models of language, as well as approaches that synthesize the
two; discussion of the relationship between language and thought can
help cast these issues in stark relief given recent claims that LLMs
may capture the linguistic abilities of humans while failing to fully
capture human reasoning.
The relationship between language and thought has been debated and
researched across diverse disciplines, including linguistics,
philosophy, cognitive science/psychology, neuroscience, and artificial
intelligence. The HSP community straddles linguistics and cognitive
science, with many research directions already making some contact
with the language-thought interface. The special session will
highlight and reinforce connections to areas of cognitive science that
are not typically represented, including social cognition, numerical
cognition, visual perception, and cognitive development, and to other
disciplines, including neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
In spite of the centrality of the relationship between language and
thought to the field of language research, no prior HSP (formerly
CUNY) meeting has focused on this topic. Many researchers in our field
work on not only how language is processed but how such processing
relates to other cognitive abilities. This special session will bring
such research into focus for the broader community.
Venue: MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Invited Speakers:
Rosemary Varley, University College, London
Anna Papafragou, University of Pennsylvania
Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin
Cristine Legare, University of Texas at Austin
Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University
Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University
Anna Ivanova, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jacob Andreas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology



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