Dear colleagues,

After consulting with many of you through our recent snap poll, and after many deliberations with our organizing committee and with our university, we have made the difficult decision to cancel the physical conference at UMass Amherst, and transition the 33rd CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference to an entirely virtual format.

We are very unhappy to make this decision. It is a serious disappointment for the organizers, the volunteers, the reviewers, and the presenters who have put a substantial amount of work into ensuring an engaging, interesting, and fun conference. This seemed like the most appropriate course of action at present, given the developing coronavirus outbreak and the recommendations of the CDC and the MA Department of Public Health for large public gatherings. An important factor in our decision were the travel restrictions that substantially impacted many of our attendees, coupled with the unease many of our attendees expressed at traveling at this point in time. It was clear that a physical CUNY conference would be missing many of our colleagues, and that those who did travel to Amherst would do so with concerns about making that trip. But beyond this, we ultimately agreed with many of our colleagues organizing conferences at the same time that canceling large public meetings was the responsible, civic-minded thing to do at this juncture.

We will hold the virtualized 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference electronically during the originally scheduled dates, 3/19 to 3/21. We are hopeful that we will be able to offer an interactive, live virtual event with much of the same content we have planned at present, though we are still working on the details of this. While there are drawbacks to the virtual format, we are choosing to look on the bright side: The virtual conference format will increase accessibility and availability of our program, will be free and open to all, will still showcase the excellent work of our community, will be archived in perpetuity on the OSF, and will offer a greener platform for sharing our research, results, and ideas. We are sad to miss the chance to see our friends and colleagues in Amherst, but we are optimistic that we will be able to still offer a high quality conference and help to disseminate your cutting-edge psycholinguistic research to the community. We encourage all of you who had planned to come and present your work at CUNY this year to embrace the opportunity to do so virtually, as the best and only way to carry on the CUNY tradition of excellence in the current circumstances.

Please keep an eye on the CUNY UMass website (https://websites.umass.edu/cuny2020) for updates over the next couple of days. We will be updating this website as soon as we can with details about how you may access CUNY, and how presenters will deliver their posters and talks in the virtual format.

The CUNY Organizing Committee

Mara Breen, Brian Dillon, Lyn Frazier, John Kingston, Shota Momma, and Adrian Staub