The 6th bi-annual Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America will be held at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD on February 19-21, 2015.

GALANA provides an outlet for cutting edge work on language acquisition, relating results in first and second language acquisition to detailed hypotheses about developing grammatical representations, the mechanisms by which these representations are acquired, and the information processing mechanisms through which these representations are engaged in real time language use by first and second language learners.

Invited Speakers:
Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers)
Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh, Bilingualism Matters)

In addition to the general session, there will be a special session Learning in generative grammar: 50 years since the Evaluation Metric. It has been 50 years since the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which first introduced the idea of an evaluation metric as a way for learners to choose between alternative grammars that were compatible with their exposure. In the intervening years, conceptions of Universal Grammar have changed, and our understanding of children’s grammatical knowledge at various ages has similarly advanced, but theories of how children use Universal Grammar to interpret the data and how they use the data to select a grammar from Universal Grammar have not been at center stage. In recent years, however, there has been a steady increase in work returning to this question, asking how different models (including rule learning, parameter setting, constraint ranking) of Universal Grammar might help learners to use the input effectively to acquire a grammatical system.

Special Session Invited Speakers:
Janet Fodor (CUNY Graduate Center)
Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine)
Bruce Tesar (Rutgers)
Charles Yang (UPenn)

Conference website: https://sites.google.com/site/2015galana/

Call for Papers:

For the General Session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

For the Special Session, we invite abstract submissions for presentations that address the question of how a given grammatical formalism or set of grammatical principles helps to solve particular learnability problems in language acquisition.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: October 6th, 2014 by 5pm EST
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=galana6

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

All submissions must:
be received by October 6th
be anonymous
be uploaded as .pdf attachments to the EasyChair site
fit on one page with 1″ margins and 12-point font, with an additional page for all examples, tables, figures and references
be accompanied by a 300-word short abstract, to be entered in the EasyChair field entitled “Abstract”
be specified for consideration in the General Session, Special Session, or both
be specified for consideration as a paper, a poster, or both

If you have any questions, please contact us at galana2015organizers@gmail.com.
Do not submit abstracts to this email address because abstracts will only be accepted through the EasyChair site.