About the Event

The question of how humans and other animals learn how to respond to environmental pressures has always been a favorite brainteaser for scientists.  Yet, the crucial point that has raised the most heated battles since ancient Greece, and  that resurfaced with property with Chomsky and Fodor in the 20th  century, can still be well framed now, in the 21^st century,  by a few unanswered questions: 

Is there a domain-specific language acquisition device or does language acquisition rely on domain-general learning mechanisms? How do these mechanisms, specific or general, make learners decide what input to represent in their brains? How specially do learners process these representations, in a constrained way or making use of general mechanisms? To what extent are the workings of the brain in language processing modular? 

This is the third international Psycholinguistics congress being held under ANPOLL, which is the Brazilian Language and Linguistics Association, and this time it is being put together by the inaugurating cooperation among the experimental linguistics labs at the Graduate Program in Linguistics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and those of  the Graduate Linguistics Program of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). The effort will give rise to an event with two parts: a School of Advanced Studies, with short courses, and the Congress, featuring talks, short talks, panel discussions and posters. 

This association between UFRJ and PUC-Rio will empower us to gather fundamental names in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences in the 21st century to open fertile interdisciplinary space to turn challenging research questions inside out. The main purpose is to create new research dialogue and cooperation  toward a better understanding of the role of grammar in the organization of the brain, the existence and characterization of a critical a period in language, and the property of linguistic theories and language processing models in describing language capacity as a separate cognitive system or as accounts of brain computation at different levels of abstraction. We also aim at discussing the new neuroscience contributions in the identification of species-specific pathways that support language computation.

This event is in honor of Jacques Mehler, a wise thinker who has never been intimidated by the daunting task of studying language acquisition even before it is manifested.