Kathrin Kleinschmidt-Schinke

In this study, we investigate how prospective teachers produce free narratives and read narratives aloud to different small groups of a second elementary school class. In doing so, they imagine the situation that they work with these two small groups in distance learning in a second elementary school class as part of their German language teaching in the school internship.
The experiment consists of four tasks with a short break in between each. The prospective teachers' task is to produce a free narrative for each of the two small groups and to read a narrative to each of the two small groups. They will be given descriptions of the four students in the two small groups. For the free narrative tasks, they will be given a picture story to use as a basis, and for the read aloud tasks, they will be given the text to be read aloud. The speech samples will be digitally recorded (audio recordings), transcribed (GAT2), analyzed with an acoustic analysis program (Praat) and coded with a data analysis program (MAXQDA).

Stephanie Kaucke

Perception of non-native speech sounds is often a challenge, especially if the non-native sound is similar to another one that is part of the native language. In that case, the non-native sound will typically be perceptually assimilated to the native category. However, not much is known yet about how people with impaired hearing perceive non-native speech and how they can acquire non-native sound categories. Thus, in this project, native English speakers will be presented with the German vowels /y/ and /ø/ in either clear speech or in a noise condition in order to simulate a hearing impairment. This way, it can be examined which vowels they confuse the German /y/ and /ø/ with. In later stages of the project, it will be examined whether listeners are able to use a learning bias for vowel harmony to their advantage to form new vowel categories and in doing so improve their vowel discrimination abilities even in adverse listening conditions.

Marina Frank

Andreas Hiemstra

Andreas Hiemstra works on grammatical cross-linguistic influence (CLI) between closely related languages (German, English & Dutch) in third language acquisition. Moreover, he is interested in the consequences of CLI for, on the one hand, the debate on the organisation of linguistic knowledge in the memory system and, on the other hand, foreign language teaching. His work at the Speech and Music Lab at Oldenburg University focusses on experimental work (e. g. self-paced reading and grammaticality judgement tasks).

Marijke De Belder

Marijke De Belder works on morphology (i.e. word-formation) and its interfaces. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, she has published on various morphosyntactic and morphophonological subjects, including the morphosyntax of nouns and verbs, derivation, compounding and allomorphy. Her work at the Speech and Music Lab at Oldenburg University focuses on morphophonological experimental work.

Ankelien Schippers

My research is located on the intersection of syntax and processing. I investigate constructions that are difficult to process and/or are considered to be ungrammatical. The type of constructions that I typically focus on are those involving ‘movement’, in other words, non-canonical word orders in which certain constituents are displaced. Movement is constrained in several ways: some constituents are easier to move than others (asymmetries) and movement can be blocked in various ways (intervention). I aim to find out to what extent these phenomena are due to autonomous grammatical constraints or whether they can be attributed to processing factors such as working memory constraints or garden-path effects. I also take into account usage factors like frequency effects and diachronic changes. I take a comparative approach in investigating these issues, focusing on the languages Dutch, German and English.