RESEARCH

Mirjam Broersma is associate professor in applied linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. She investigates how people acquire and use multiple languages. Her research has addressed second language acquisition as well as early bilingualism, in children as well as adults, using a psycholinguistic experimental approach. She currently leads a large-scale investigation of the effects of psychological trauma on second language acquisition in refugees.

Some of her favorite research themes:

  • Second language acquisition in refugees
  • Birth language memories in international adoptees
  • Sound perception and production, word recognition, segmentation of continuous speech, and vocal emotion recognition in non-native listening
  • Codeswitching

Some of the research tools she has co-developed:

  • Lexical tests for advanced learners of English, Dutch, and German: LexTALE  
  • Ventriloquist paradigm  

Current project

Second language acquisition in refugees: Effects of psychological trauma on linguistic and communicative skills

Funded by a five year Vici career development grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO, this project includes two postdoc and two PhD projects:

Postdoc projects

  • Jelle Brouwer: Second language acquisition in refugees: Effects of psychological trauma on communicative skills in children. With Susanne Brouwer, Kobie van Krieken, and Elisa van Ee.
  • Louise Shepperd: Second language acquisition in refugees: Effects of psychological trauma on linguistic skills in children. With Eva Knopp and Elisa van Ee.

PhD projects

  • Femke Blankestijn: Second language acquisition in refugees: Effects of psychological trauma on communicative skills in adults. With Susanne Brouwer, Kobie van Krieken, and Elisa van Ee.
  • Roos Zwiers: Second language acquisition in refugees: Effects of psychological trauma on linguistic skills in adults. With Eva Knopp and Elisa van Ee.

Other PhD projects

Ongoing

  • Amber Bartlett: Digital skills and refugee integration. With Noemi Mena Montes, Lieke Verheijen, and Brigitte Planken.
  • Monica Wagner: Individual differences in foreign accent. With Kristin Lemhöfer and James McQueen.

Completed

  • Aurora Troncoso Ruiz (2022). Non-Native Phonetic Accommodation in Interactions with Humans and With Computers. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Emily Felker (2021). Learning Second Language Speech Perception in Natural Settings. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Chara Tsoukala (2021). Bilingual Sentence Production and Code-Switching: Neural Network Simulations. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Claire Goriot (2019). Early-English Education Works No Miracles: Cognitive and Linguistic Development of Mainstream, Early-English, and Bilingual Primary-School Pupils in The Netherlands. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Sammie Tarenskeen (2016). What’s the Use of Colour? On the Role of Salience in Overspecification. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Laurence Bruggeman (2016). Nativeness, Dominance, and the Flexibility of Listening to Spoken Language. PhD dissertation, University of Western Sydney, Australia.
  • Wencui Zhou (2015). Assessing Birth Language Memory in Young Adoptees. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.
  • Jiyoun Choi (2014). Rediscovering a Forgotten Language. PhD dissertation, Radboud University.

Discontinued

  • Yachan Liang: When speech becomes emotional: A cross-linguistic study of emotion production and perception in tone and non-tone languages.