Aoju Chen

 Aoju Chen

aoju chen

Aoju Chen's research areas include phonology, prosody in discourse, language acquisition and language processing. She has led a research group funded by a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Her research group investigated how children learn to use prosody to encode focus across languages. Her current research focuses on internal structure of categories in different phonological domains, individual differences in phonological competence of adults and children, effect of training on acquisition of L2 phonology, processing of the prosody-semantics interface in L1 and L2, and the role of language and communication in development of belonging. Aoju Chen uses behavioural, eye tracking and neuroimaging methods in her research. In addition, she is interested in research on the relationship between language development and other aspects of child development, such as morality and sports. 

Aoju Chen is currently an associate professor in English linguistics (Phonology and Language Acquisition) at Utrecht University, a principle investigator in Utrecht University's strategic theme 'Dynamics of Youth', and a principle investigator in Utrecht Graduate School of Life Sciences – Master Program in Neuroscience & Cognition. 

 

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News

Work presented at Neurobiology of Language 2016 in London

‘Automatic detection of morpho-syntactic violation in Dutch? a Mismatch Negativity (MMN) study’ by Cas Coopmans, Marijn Struiksma, Peter Coopmans, and Aoju Chen 

Associate editor for Laboratory Phonology

Aoju Chen has been appointed as associate editor for the journal Laboratory Phonology, the official journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. It publishes reports on scientific study of all phonological/phonetic aspects of spoken and signed language across domains of linguistics and related disciplines, e.g. psychology, computer science, and communication science. 

 

Successful PhD thesis defense

Anna Sara Romøren succesfully defended her PhD thesis titled 'Hunting highs and lows: The acquisition of prosodic focus marking in Swedish and Dutch at Utrecht University on 1 July, 2016.