Professor Brechtje Post

My research centres on how linguistic systems exploit speech sounds to convey different types of meaning. My focus is primarily on prosody: intonation, accentuation, rhythm, and phrasing.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines (phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational linguistics), this research addresses questions like:

• How do prosodic structures differ cross-linguistically, and how do linguistic systems constrain prosodic structure?
• What cross-linguistic variation can we expect to observe in the phonetic realisation of prosodic structure?
• What are the neural and cognitive underpinnings of prosody?
• How do children acquire the relevant mappings between phonetics, phonology, and other parts of the linguistic system that are at play?
• What role does prosody play in language learning in early and late bilinguals?