MayFest 2006
The Mayfest Committee would like to thank everyone who participated in this yar's Language Learning Fest. Click here to download the workshop program and abstracts.
This two-day workshop is an annual event organized by the graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. This workshop presents the current state of research in a particular domain of interest to linguists from a variety of perspectives. This year our speakers will be presenting on topics related to the question of how primary linguistic data is utilized during language acquisition (read more about it here).
MayFest 2006 has no registration fee and is open to all interested guests. We strongly encourage anyone with an interest in language acquisition to attend our workshop. Click here to register online!
Whatever underlying cognitive mechanisms for language usage are presupposed by any particular theory of language acquisition, the fact remains that the limited and noisy data children are exposed to is sufficient for them to learn their native language. The goal of this year's UMD Linguistics MayFest is to bring together researchers from a variety of areas within the field of language acquisition who are working on the problem of how this primary linguistic data is processed by children learning language. The conference will focus on two active and often independent subfields in language acquisition research (phonological development and syntactic development). In both fields, a series of talks representing contrasting theoretical and methodological perspectives (e.g., experimental, statistical, cue-based, computational modeling) in both of these areas will be presented. Bill Idsardi and Jeff Lidz, two recent additions to the UMD Linguistics faculty, will serve as discussants and offer a summary of the viewpoints presented and facilitate a discussion between the participants and the theories they represent. By juxtaposing such divergent theoretical positions, the underlying problems facing each of these domains will be brought into sharper focus. Additionally, by presenting theories from subfields of language acquisition that are often researched independently, participants will have the opportunity to seek cross-domain commonalities by exploring general questions about the role of, for example, probability distributions, Bayesian statistics, and cues for parameter setting in a variety of linguistic domains.