Welcome to AAAS Section Z!

Welcome to the homepage of Section Z, the Linguistics and Language Science of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). We are one of the 24 sections of AAAS.

Section Z Linguistics and Language Sciences is open to everyone with an interest in human language and how it works, including:

  • how children develop language
  • how language is housed in our brains
  • how language changes over the life span
  • how language sometimes becomes disordered in children and adults
  • how the effects of language disorders can be reduced.
  • how languages are similar, how they differ, and why
  • how spoken and signed languages are similar in some ways and different in others
  • how a language grows, changes, and dies

Upcoming AAAS Meeting:

February 14-18, 2013
Boston, MA

February 13-17, 2014
Chicago, IL

February 12-16, 2015
San Jose, CA

[more information]

Science Publications:

Here are some articles of interest for linguists.
[download here]

Links for Linguists:

Here is a list of organizations and other sites of interest.
[links]

Section Z promotes understanding of linguistics and allied language sciences by presenting symposia and sponsoring speakers at AAAS meetings, and by encouraging members and their colleagues to present their work in ways that are understandable to other scientists and to the public. Because the study of language is highly interdisciplinary, Section Z actively seeks to cooperate with other AAAS Sections in planning symposia.

The establishment of this website provides another medium for promoting general knowledge of what linguists, speech-language pathologists, lexicographers, computational linguists, language teachers, reading education researchers, and other members of the general language professions do, and how their work helps us understand human beings and address some of their needs.

Section Z Linguistics and Language Sciences is formally affiliated with two major professional organizations: the Linguistic Society of America and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

If you are thinking about joining AAAS, check out the "Why Join AAAS?" section on this website.

Ling Lingx

Links Description
Academy of Aphasia Members of the Academy of Aphasia are researchers who study the language problems of people who have neurological diseases. Some of these researchers also provide clinical services to help people improve their language skills following strokes or other illnesses.
ACL The Association for Computational Linguistics is THE international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation.
ASHA The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is the professional, scientific, and credentialing association for audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists.
CHILDES CHILDES is the child language component of the TalkBank system. TalkBank is a system for sharing and studying conversational interactions.
ELF The Endangered Language Fund is a small non-profit organization founded with the goal of supporting endangered language preservation and documentation projects.
Funknet Funknet is a forum for discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics.
Language Log Language Log is a blog about linguists and languages. It is run by linguists at University of Pennsylvania.
LSA The Linguistic Society of America is the major professional society in the United States that is exclusively dedicated to the advancement of the scientific study of language.
NAA The National Aphasia Association is a nonprofit organization that promotes public education, research, rehabilitation and support services to assist people with aphasia and their families.
Praat Praat: doing phonetics by computer.