CSLI in Stanford sent out a call for posters for a workshop on bridging computational and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of meaning. The deadline for submitting abstracts is November 1st. From the workshop description:
In recent years, the study of meaning has seen rapid advances in two still largely disconnected areas: probabilistic semantics/pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Both of these areas have drawn on traditional formal semantics/pragmatics for inspiration, especially Grice’s original insights, while adding other perspectives from cognitive science. On the one hand, the burgeoning field of probabilistic pragmatics has been hugely successful in modeling a wide variety of phenomena as the outcome of iterated Bayesian reasoning between speakers and listeners — including scalar implicature, M-implicature, figurative meaning, pronoun resolution; as well as the interpretation of gradable predicates, quantifiers, spatial relations, generics, and referring expressions On the other hand, psycholinguistic research in experimental semantics and pragmatics is painting an ever more complex picture of the interactions of multiple factors in the computation of speaker meaning, including literal meaning, perspective-taking, prosody, availability of alternatives, the Question Under Discussion, world knowledge, and speaker-specific idiosyncrasies.