Language Science Lunch Talk: John Scott (SLLC)

Talks begin at 12:30 PM, with lunch served at 12:15 PM. Vegetarian options available. Let us know if you have other dietary restrictions.

From Categorical Perception to Graphotactical Projection: Phonotactic Structure and (Un)Labelling in L2+ Phonological Learning

Abstract: In this talk, I will outline issues in adult L2+ phonology that motivate my current research interests, starting from my experience working on the DMAP model (Darcy et al., 2012), which focused on category perception and its importance for lexical encoding. My dissertation and subsequent work has investigated L2+ acquisition of distributional knowledge (phonological and phonotactic; Scott, 2019; Scott & Darcy, 2023) and aimed to address certain methodological issues that arise from some popular experimental methods' reliance on grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) when employed with early-stage adult L2+ learners in foreign language acquisition (FLA) contexts. Reflecting the field's increasing attunement to the critical need for investigation of the connections between phonology and orthography in adult L2+ learner populations (e.g., Bassetti, Escudero, & Hayes-Harb, 2015; Bordag, Gor, & Opitz, 2021), my most recent work investigates the potential for label-free auditory phonetic training to support beginning adult L2+ learners' perception of target language phonological categories and orthographic patterns, both crucial for speech perception and vocabulary learning at the earliest stages of exposure.