Abstract submissions are welcomed for the 6th biannual conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA 6). GALANA 6 will take place on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, MD on February 19-21, 2015. This conference aims to provide an outlet for cutting edge work on language acquisition, relating results in first and second language acquisition to detailed hypotheses about developing grammatical representations, the mechanisms by which these representations are acquired, and the information processing mechanisms through which these representations are engaged in real time language use by first and second language learners. Invited speakers include Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers) and Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh, Bilingualism Matters). For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.
In addition to the general session, there will be a special session entitled “Learning in generative grammar: 50 years since the Evaluation Metric”. It has been 50 years since the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which first introduced the idea of an evaluation metric as a way for learners to choose between alternative grammars that were compatible with their exposure. In the intervening years, conceptions of Universal Grammar (UG) have changed, and our understanding of children's grammatical knowledge at various ages has similarly advanced, but theories of how children use UG to interpret the data and how they use the data to select a grammar from UG have not been at center stage. In recent years, however, there has been a steady increase in work returning to this question, asking how different models (including rule learning, parameter setting, constraint ranking) of UG might help learners to use the input effectively to acquire a grammatical system. Invited speakers for this special session include Janet Fodor (CUNY Graduate Center), Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine), Bruce Tesar (Rutgers), and Charles Yang (UPenn). We also invite abstracts submissions for several additional talks that address the question of how a given grammatical formalism or set of grammatical principles helps to solve particular learnability problems in linguistics.
Abstract submissions should be anonymous and should be uploaded as .pdf attachments to the EasyChair site (not typed into the text box). Submissions should fit on one page with 1” margins and 12 point font, with an extra page allowed for examples, tables, figures and references.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submissions due: October 6th, 2014 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time.
Notifications by: November 21, 2014
IMPORTANT WEBSITES:
