Ongoing language projects within the LOT institutes

This study aims to evaluate the relative contributions of auditory and cognitive problems to the difficulties older adults encounter in processing speech.

A cooperation between the ACLC and the Netherlands Cancer Institute - Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital. All research has a clinical focus.

What does an “uhm” say about second language proficiency?

This project investigates speaking fluency from the point of view of the second language speaker, and from the point of view of the listener.
From the point of view of the speaker, disfluencies such as a pause or “uhm” may result from different kinds of problems. Speakers may say “uhm” because they do not know what to say. Speakers may also hesitate because they do not know how to say what they want to say. For second language speakers, the hesitations or disfluencies arising in this formulation stage of speech planning are more frequent than for native speakers, because they may have trouble selecting the correct word, or in making a grammatical sentence. In this project, we will investigate how disfluencies due to difficulties in formulating second language speech can be disentangled from other (“normal”) disfluencies.

From the point of view of the listener, we will investigate how listeners perceive several types of disfluencies. We will ask raters to judge on fluency and investigate which aspects of speech they take into account when they are making their judgments. The results of these two viewpoints taken together will show which characteristics of productive and perceptual fluency overlap, and which characteristics tend to be unique for the chosen point of view.

This programme investigates the influence of phonotactic constraints on speech segmentation, and the acquisition of phonotactic constraints, in particular in a second language.

Research into the nature of the preverbal message that guides the linguistic encoding of speakers communicative intentions.

This project investigates the acquisition and processing of structures with A-movement (raising and unaccusatives). In the case of raising-verbs it investigates their evidential semantics and the influence of this semantics on acquisition and processing. In the case of unaccusatives it studies the effects of structural, semantic and thematic differences on processing and the source of the processing differences.