A fixed-term 100 % position is available at the University of Agder, Faculty of Humanities and Education, as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, for a period of three years. The position is located at the University of Agder’s Kristiansand campus. The starting date is the 8th of January 2024.

The person who is hired will contribute to a research project within the Experimental Linguistics Research Group and its associated laboratory (ELL) run by Prof. Linda Wheeldon and Prof. Allison Wetterlin.  The research project will be run in collaboration with Dr. Katrien Segaert (School of Psychology, University of Birmingham).

The research will employ speech analysis techniques to investigate proficiency in spoken language production in terms of utterance complexity and spoken fluency. A core aspect of the research will be to assess the impact of both healthy ageing and bilingualism across measures of language proficiency. To address these issues, the project will be exploiting a large and rich speech-dataset collected during the FAB project. The dataset comprises natural speech from a picture description task (see OSF project: https://osf.io/shwcn/). A large group of participants (approximately 340) produced short descriptions these pictures. They were diverse in terms of age (20-85), socio-economic status, education level and ethnicity, and included both monolingual English speakers, and Norwegian-English bilinguals who described different scenes in each of their languages. For each speaker there are objective measures of language proficiency, non-linguistic cognitive processes, and also detailed information about the bilinguals’ language profile.

Deadline for applications: 15 June 2023

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