Lewendon, Jen

Jennifer Lewendon
Start date:
October 2016
Research Topic:
Bilingual Prosody and Phonology
Research pathway:
Research Supervisor:
Anouschka Foltz
Supervising school:
School of Linguistics & English Language,
Primary funding source:
ESRC Studentship

My research interests lie primarily in psycholinguistics, specifically the mental and neural processes associated with the perception and recognition of spoken language.
Tasked with processing continuous streams of speech, a listener utilises multiple cues to assist lexical identification. The activation of numerous competing candidates during this process of speech perception is further exaggerated for the bilingual listener by non-selective lexical access, resulting in competition not only from target language candidates but similar items within the inactive lexicon. Using ERP methods, in particular the N400, I intend to explore how certain features of language facilitate or inhibit lexical access in bilingual listeners.

Projects:

  • Sounding foreign: the role of phonology in constraining lexical access within an integrated lexicon.
  • Investigating the role of stress in facilitating lexical-access.
  • Wrong tune, right words? How prosody might break down the language barrier.

My research intends to build upon current models of bilingual word recognition to develop a greater understanding of the role of both suprasegmental information & phonology.

Google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=oMuNHZoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Training resources:
https://j-lewen.github.io/erp/docs/table-of-contents/training/