Postdoctoral researcher for ERC Project 'Foreign Casual Speech'

The ERC project 'Foreign Casual Speech' investigates how advanced learners of a foreign language understand the reduced pronunciation variants that are so frequent in casual speech (e.g. 'probly' for 'probably' or 'mis' for 'mist'). Advanced learners are expected to process these variants more slowly than native listeners and to make more use of the semantic context. As a postdoctoral researcher you will investigate in detail the time course and information usage in the comprehension of reduced pronunciation variants and the words surrounding these variants in natural conversations, by means of experiments recording ERPs. These ERP experiments will test both native speakers of Dutch processing French utterances and native speakers of Spanish processing English utterances. Since the experiments will preferably test the comprehension of sentences derived from natural conversations, you will have to use new statistical analysis methods such as generalized additive mixed models or Functional Data Analysis. You will be assisted by student assistants, who will conduct the experiments and code the stimuli, and by senior researchers, who will assist with the new statistical analyses. You will help the PhD students in the research group to conduct (simple) ERP experiments.