Vacancy for a PhD on the ISLA project.

PhD A: Comprehension of FEs by L2 learners
Application deadline: 15 November 2014
For more details, also on how to submit your application, click here.

Job description

The PhD project is being hosted by two research instutes: the Donders Centre for Cognition (DCC) in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Centre for Language studies (CLS) in the Faculty of Arts. The project is part of a research programme investigating the processing of formulaic expressions (FEs). The project’s aim is to longitudinally study the comprehension of FEs by L2 learners as a function of training/exposure, FE transparency, mutual information, and frequency.

On-line experiments, involving behavioral and electrophysiological measures, will be repeatedly conducted in different phases of FE training. Links to issues in monolingual and bilingual sentence processing (e.g., predictive processing) will be forged. The FE training will take place by means of a Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) system and is topic of a different project within the programme.

Job requirements

Preference will be given to candidates with an MA-degree in cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, linguistics, or other language-related fields, who are highly motivated to conduct cognitive research. Candidates must be interested in studying monolingual and bilingual sentence processing in relation to second language acquisition.
Candidates should have excellent analytic and statistical / methodological skills, experience in experimental cognitive-psychological research (ideally within psycholinguistics). Experience with electrophysiological research techniques and/or eye-tracking is commendable.
Because of the German-Dutch population of experimental participants, it is desirable that the candidate is reasonably fluent in both Dutch and German. Because the results of research will be presented at international conferences and published in high impact international journals, the candidate should also have an excellent written and spoken command of English.