Embodied and Situated Language Processing 2012

ESLP 2012 is the fifth event in a series founded in 2007. A 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 (March 2010). ESLP took place again in June, 2009 in Rotterdam, in association with the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Amsterdam, and in September 2010 at UCSD San Diego together with the Cognitive Linguistics Conference. In 2011 it was hosted by Bielefeld University.

ESLP 2012 has a focus on embodiment in language learning. The extensive literature on embodied language processing is now in need of theories specifying how grounding takes place, and how and when grounding occurs in learning a language. How malleable are these non-linguistic system activations as a function of the task being conducted? How do these effects change over time? What role does grounding play in language evolution, and language learning in robots?

The keynote speakers for this event approach these issues from a number of converging perspectives which speak to this topic using varying methods and approaches.

Gerry Altmann– York University, UK

Bernard Hommel, University of Leiden, the Netherlands

Jesse Snedeker, Harvard University, USA

28-30 August 2012

 Abstract submission will open on February 15th, 2012, and will close on April 15th, 2012.

Submit abstract