Linguistic Student becomes UROP Scholar this Semester

The Department of Linguistics would like to congratulate Julia Vonessen on becoming the UROP Scholar for the Fall semester 2018. Julia's project is titled, "The impact of listener attitudes on the comprehension of nonnative-accented speech." Below is a short paragraph explaining the current project that she is working on.

A well-known challenge in communication involves the perception of accented speech by native speaker listeners. Previous research has shown that, in addition to other factors, listener attitudes toward individual non-native speakers impacts their ability to understand the speech of those particular speakers. This research project will expand on that research by investigating the extent to which listeners’ attitudes toward a given nonnative accent in general, as opposed to the speech of individual speakers who exhibit that accent, predict their ability to understand nonnative-accented speech. We expect that the comprehension ability of listeners will be impacted by their attitudes towards each nonnative accent, as captured by their attitudes towards multiple speakers representing each of several native languages.

Congratulations Julia!