Academic and Public Service

A weekly seminar series entitled Parallel Distributed Processing and Natural Language Processing (PDPNLP) is also sponsored by CRL, with presentations on a wide range of topics on language development and language processing in human beings and neural networks.

A workshop on children with focal brain injury was hosted by CRL in July, 1992 and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Thirty seven participants plus workshop guests participated, many from abroad. The major purpose of the workshop was to provide a forum in which investigators discussed the major issues most central to the question of understanding development in the focal lesion population and to reach agreement on common definitional criteria.

CRL hosted the 33rd Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, November 5-7, 1995. (The Program is attached.) 225 scientists and researchers from around the globe (England, Italy, eastern United States, China, Japan, India, Israel and Australia) attended the meeting in order to share their current work in platform sessions, a symposium, poster sessions, informal discussion and collaboration. Some topics discussed were: word class phenomena, localization and imaging, primary progressive aphasia, syntax and morpho-syntax, and phonology and lexicon. The meeting provided a showcase for the scientists of UCSD and the work in brain and language being performed at The Center for Research in Language. UCSD graduate and undergraduate students had the rare opportunity to attend this high level research meeting and interact with scientists at the top of their field. As 1995 Chair of the Academy, Dr. Bates organized the meeting and program events.

CRL has played an increasingly important role in teaching at UCSD. During this review period, CRL obtained and administered a training grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders, entitled "Language, Communication and the Brain." This five-year program provided four pre-doctoral and two-postdoctoral fellowships per year, with predoctoral fellowships awarded to students in the departments of Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology. A proposal for the 5-year renewal of our NIDCD training program has just been submitted, with a request for an additional two predoctoral slots per year to accommodate students in the new joint doctoral program.

In 1996, a new joint doctoral program in Language and Communicative Disorders was founded, jointly administered by CRL (the administrative home at UCSD) and The School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University. Marilyn Newhoff serves as the director of the SDSU component, and CRL Director Bates co-directs the UCSD component with Psychology Department chairman David Swinney. The joint doctoral program enrolled its first graduate class in the fall of 1996.

In addition to these formal commitments to graduate teaching, the CRL laboratories serve as "home base" to a large number of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students with a primary interest in language. These have included a substantial number of minority students who are attracted to the many cross-linguistic and multilingual projects underway in CRL, using their own special skills as fluent multilinguals while they learn about basic research in language development and language processing.