Katharina S. Schuhmann

Globally speaking, my scholarship addresses second language (L2) and foreign language learning and teaching, linguistic analyses of phonetic, phonological, and morphological data in native and L2 or bilingual speakers, and psycholinguistic investigations into perceptual adaptation and entrainment between speakers. I am particularly interested in a) uncovering the principles and underlying mechanisms of cross-linguistic effects in L2 and bilingual speech perception and production, and b) in linguistic adaptation phenomena within and across languages. Discoveries from L2 and bilingual speech perception and production studies provide a unique perspective about the role of experience and input for the development of mental representations of linguistic structures. I am particularly interested in the plasticity of linguistic representations, and I study how hearing a novel accent or learning a second language (temporarily) changes representations or processes in one or both languages. In another line of work, we investigate the factors influencing how native speakers come to share perspectives and entrain on lexical expressions in referential communication tasks. Ultimately, the goal of my research endeavors is to understand the mechanisms that lead to changes in linguistic knowledge and behavior over short or long time spans.