Allard Jongman
University of Kansas, KS·Psychology
Stress is the extra emphasis placed on one syllable in a word, such as REcord the noun versus reCORD the verb. Adults learning a second language often struggle to hear stress when their native language uses it differently or not at all.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Education Research
- Topics
second language acquisition
L2 learning
word stress
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Test whether four sessions of phonetic training improve second-language learners' perception and mental processing of word stress, measured with recall, discrimination and identification tasks before and after training.
- Test the Automatic Selective Perception model's prediction that attention is needed to learn stress, by comparing learners whose feedback targets stress placement with learners whose feedback targets initial consonant voicing.
- Determine whether gains in stress perception carry over to untrained syllable positions, using pre- and post-tests including AX and novel AQX discrimination tasks.
More about the research
Training programs are known to help learners hear new consonants, vowels and tones. It is less clear whether they help with stress, which spans whole syllables rather than single sounds, or what role attention plays in learning it.
Why it matters
Many second-language learners have trouble hearing which syllable is stressed, which can make words harder to recognize. Showing whether attention-focused phonetic training works could help language teachers design better methods for teaching stress. It could also refine theories of how adults acquire the sound systems of new languages.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ratree Wayland
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
Test whether listening training with immediate feedback plus speaking practice improves articulatory coordination of novel consonant clusters more than speaking practice alone, in a two-group training study.
Jonathan Amith
Gettysburg College, PA·Computer Science
Build POWSM, a foundation speech model that transcribes any language as sequences of consonants and vowels, and prompt it with vector representations of sound correspondences so it can recognize low-resource varieties as transformed versions of well-resourced ones.
Michael Brown
Villanova University, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which sound information listeners use to tell spoken words apart by recording brain responses in the first few hundred milliseconds after hearing speech.
The school
University of Kansas: 26 labs on PI Pages, $546M a year on research, 351 research doctorates a year.
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