Question: Did studying English as an undergraduate inspire you to work in language and speech learning?

Gwen Brekelmans answered on 5 Mar 2021:

Hi Louisa, great question! Yes, it really did. In my undergraduate we spent a lot of time studying English literature, but we also got an introduction to language sciences. In those classes, we were taught ‘phonetics’, which is the science behind the sounds we use when speaking. For this we had to learn all the sounds that are used in all the different languages in the world (there is actually a list of these sounds! it’s called the ‘international phonetic alphabet’. There’s a clickable version here where you can listen to the sounds: https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/ ).
In learning all these different sounds, I found that it was really tricky to be able to tell some of the sounds apart because they were so unfamiliar! But with some studying I learnt to tell them apart, but some people found it really hard to learn some of the sounds still so I was interested in trying to find out more on this. So in my projects in my undergraduate and my master’s I also looked more at how people learn to make the sounds of a foreign language, and that’s how I got interested in all the research I’m doing now 🙂