[CogSci] Funded PhD studentship available at Birkbeck, University of London

[Adam Tierney]

This PhD studentship, fully funded by the Bloomsbury Colleges, will use EEG and behavioral techniques to examine the effects of language background on perceptual strategies. Recent work from our laboratory has shown that Mandarin speakers place more importance on pitch and less importance on duration compared to English speakers when categorizing linguistic phrase boundaries and musical beats, and that Mandarin speakers have difficulty ignoring pitch and attending to other acoustic dimensions. These findings suggest that learning a first language can change the salience of different perceptual dimensions.

This project will investigate the relationship between language background, cue weighting during auditory categorization, and dimensional salience, and test whether Mandarin speakers can be trained to direct their attention away from pitch and towards other, more relevant acoustic dimensions during English speech perception.

For further details and to apply see:

http://www.bloomsbury.ac.uk/studentships/studentships-2020/perceptual-strategies-underlying-second-language-acquisition

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