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Featured Undergraduate Research

Becca Koerner's Language Acquisition Research

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Becca Koerner is a junior studying Communication Sciences and Disorders and Spanish. Her mentor is Dr. Christine Shea from the Spanish department and Becca works on her project studying the relationship between age, language use, and phonological development of young child second language learners in the dual language immersion program at West Liberty Elementary School. They are looking at how two levels of phonological knowledge - perceiving and articulating sounds, and the way sounds pattern in words - interact in the linguistic development of young bilinguals. This is important to study because these children are learning their second language before they have fully acquired their first language. As a consequence, a bilingual child's first language may have influence on their second language, and their second language may have influence on their first language.

From the information collected, Dr. Shea wishes to develop hypotheses regarding how the interactive phonological system of early sequential bilinguals develops over time. Dr. Shea has done some control tests with monolingual spanish speakers from Mexico City, Mexico. However, Becca helps Dr. Shea run tests such as Nonword repetition tasks and phonological awareness tasks on participants from West Liberty Elementary school.  She also helps Dr. Shea phonetically transcribe the results so they may interpret them. Next semester they plan to have finished the tests with students, and plan to begin analyzing and interpreting the results. Becca plays a key role as a partner to Christine and assistant with testing participants and analyzing results.  

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