Biography:
My name is Yushuang Liu and I am third-year graduate student pursuing a dual title degree in Developmental Psychology and Language Science working with Janet van Hell. I am generally interested in language learning during different developmental stages, as well as how prior language exposure and experiences impact language comprehension and further learning.
Project Summary:
For my PIRE project, I will be traveling to Nijmegen, the Netherlands this summer to work with Dr. Sharon Unsworth at Radboud University. I will conduct a behavioral study examining L2 accented sentence comprehension in 11-12 years old Dutch (L1)- English (L2) children in the Netherlands. There will be three types of accented English sentences: Dutch-accented, British-accented, and Chinese-accented. I will also investigate the role of vocabulary size in foreign-accented speech comprehension, because previous developmental research on accented speech comprehension has revealed a positive association between vocabulary size and accent comprehension. Children who will be tested in this study participate in the Early-Bird program, a program implemented at (selected) Dutch schools and that offers L2 English language classes starting in Kindergarten. Children will be tested at their schools.