On Friday, March 28th, Brian Rocca defended his doctoral dissertation entitled "The effects of lexical characteristics, phonetic categorization, and vocabulary size on language learners' phonolexical representations: A lexical friction account"
The defense itself and the Q&A / discussion in the audience were a rousing success!  Congratulations on a job really well done, Brian! And good luck in your new lab at Northwestern!

In early January, we published a State of the Scholarship paper in SSLA! This is the result of several years of work, which started during a wonderful workshop in Marseilles, in May 2022. We're happy with the results - let us know what you think! 

• Darcy, I., Llompart, M., Hayes-Harb, R., Mora, J. C., Adrian, M., Cook, S. & Ernestus, M. (2024). Phonological processing and the L2 mental lexicon: Looking back and moving forward. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263124000482
• Click here for an Open Accessible Summary (OASIS).

​In other news, Isabelle will be at the 47th German Linguistics Society Conference, taking place in early March at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz -- her alma mater!! She's very excited about this! :) Her invited talk is entitled: Learning the sounds of words in a second language: Exploring individual differences and modulating factors at the phonology-lexicon interface.

Here's a photo of the campus main entrance: 

2024-11-21: First snow day!! :) And a rushed time-line on the move which required us to pack up and leave the complicated Sycamore building last week! This week was set-up. Everything went quite smoothly this time, and we are happy about our new lab space in Ballantine Hall 119! There will be still some setting up to do but overall, things are starting to look all squared away. Thank you to all the volunteers who agreed to help!

THREE other great pieces of news:

1. Franziska Kruger will defend her dissertation in December 2024 - Congratulations on submitting the doctoral thesis!
2. Brian Rocca, with Miquel Llompart and Isabelle Darcy just got their paper accepted in Bilingualism, Language and Cognition! The title is "Phonological neighbourhood density, phonetic categorization, and vocabulary size differentially affect the phonolexical encoding of easy and difficult L2 segmental contrasts" -- Congrats Brian!!
3. And just today, Hunter Brakovec and Isabelle submitted their manuscript on the lexical encoding of L2 vowels to a very good journal (top secret): Fingers crossed!!!

Congrats everyone for your really hard work!

2024-10-11: We have beautiful Fall weather in Bloomington these days - but unfortunatly we just learned of yet another lab move on the (near) horizon. While we don't know yet  where we'll land, we know we need to get out of Sycamore Hall by the end of December 2024. That's at least some weeks of notice, thankfully. Hang in there everyone and make sure to back up your and archive your projects.

2024-09-16: We're really excited to announce that after several years of work, FINALLY, Isabelle's new book is now published! It's called Second Language Speech Processing: A guide to conducting experimental research - published by Routledge. Check it out! 
It's conceived as a hands-on guide to develop and run a perception experiment in L2 speech processing. I review a number of experimental paradigms, but most importantly, I describe how to design, plan and execute a study from start to finish - including how to maximize the quality of your precious data, how to organize your files, and how to realize an archive and share the study following Open Science principles.
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We also submitted several abstracts to the New Sounds conference, which will take place in Toronto (Canada) in April 2025.  Hopefully we'll get to go to this wonderful conference!