Aoju Chen

Aoju Chen is full professor of Language Development in Relation to Socialisation and Identity. Her research in concerned with both fundamental research questions on phonetics, phonology and the prosody-pragmatics interface and the issue of how acquisition of such linguistic abilities in a first or second language interacts with the learner’s development into a socially functional individual in a familiar or new culture.

As a principle investigator (PI) in the interdisciplinary research pillar Belonging within the university’s strategic theme Dynamics of Youth,  Aoju Chen investigates how development of speech entrainment at multiple linguistic levels in child-parent interactions influences the development of sense of belonging in children and adolescents, which has strong effects on their emotional and mental well-being and cognitive functioning.

In the NWO-funded VIDI project “Get the focus right: a cross-linguistic study on prosodic encoding of focus in children” (2011-2016), Aoju Chen and her team have studied the developmental path to adult-like competence in using prosody to structure information across languages, how children acquiring the same language differ from each other in this process, and what linguistic and non-linguistic factors can account for the individual differences.