Janet van Hell
Bio
Janet van Hell (PhD, University of Amsterdam) is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Linguistics, and Director of the Center for Language Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Funded (mainly) by the National Science Foundation, research in her Bilingualism and Linguistic Diversity (BiLD) Lab focuses on the neural and cognitive basis of human language processing in linguistically diverse contexts, in L2 learners and monolingual, bilingual and bidialectal speakers. She combines neuropsychological and behavioral techniques to study patterns of cross-language interaction at the lexical and sentence levels, codeswitching, and accented-speech processing. She serves as PI of the NSF NRT program “Linguistic diversity across the lifespan: Transforming training to advance human-technology interaction”. She is also Co-Editor of Language Learning’s Cognitive Neuroscience Series.
Neurocognitive signatures of accented speech processing
Most late second language (L2) learners, even those with high L2 proficiency, have a noticeable accent in their L2. Nonnative-accented speech can pose comprehension challenges, as listeners must reconcile incoming deviating acoustic signals with their existing L1-based phonological representations. These challenges can be exacerbated when the nonnative-accented speech is embedded in noise, as may happen when you listen to your friend in a noisy restaurant or to your colleague during the conference coffee break. How do listeners process the speech produced by nonnative-accented speakers? I will discuss recent behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) evidence on how listeners process semantic and syntactic information in sentences spoken by nonnative- and native-accented speakers. More specifically, I will discuss studies that examined how nonnative- and native-accented sentence processing is affected by listeners’ own language experience, information about the speaker’s identity, and noisy vs. quiet environments. Together these findings highlight the importance of integrating the impact of socio-indexical cues, listener experience, and environmental features in theoretical models on how listeners process speech produced by nonnative-accented speakers.
