{"id":59,"date":"2014-03-12T10:02:51","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T10:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.karinwanrooij.nl\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2026-04-13T13:22:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:22:38","slug":"profile-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.karinwanrooij.nl\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Non-academic profile: see Main Activities<\/strong><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n

ORCID iD<\/a>
Google Scholar Profile<\/a><\/h3>\n

Research interests<\/h3>\n
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Speech perception, production and learning
Language acquisition (native and non-native, typical and non-typical)
Listening comprehension (native and non-native)
Neurobiology of speech\/language processing
Japanese (and other languages)
Statistics and methodology<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Short CV<\/h3>\n

Karin Wanrooij studied Japanese at Leiden University (cum laude<\/em>) and Kyoto University in Japan (scholarship Japanese Ministry of Education<\/em>) and Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam (cum laude<\/em>). Her PhD research (supervisors: prof. dr. Paul Boersma <\/a>and dr. Titia van Zuijen<\/a>) focused on how we learn the speech sounds of our mother tongues in infancy and of a new language in adulthood. The thesis yielded a nomination for the AVT\/An\u00e9la Dissertation Prize.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, Karin received a grant from the NRO<\/a> (the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research) for studying how reduced pronunciations (e.g., in English: \u201cnahpmeam\u201d for \u201cdo you know what I mean\u201d) affect high-school students\u2019 listening comprehension of a second language. She completed the project at the department of Educational Sciences<\/a> of Leiden University (cooperation with prof. dr. Maartje Raijmakers<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Thereafter, Karin investigated early predictors of dyslexia in toddlers’ brain signals at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS<\/a>\u00a0(together with prof. dr. Frank Wijnen<\/a>, dr. Hugo Schnack<\/a>, dr. Ao Chen<\/a> and dr. Florian Huber of the eScience Center<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Aside from doing research, Karin has taught several courses at different universities and departments, in the areas of phonetics, language acquisition, general cognitive development, research methodologies and statistics.<\/p>\n

NRO-funded research project (completed 2019)<\/h3>\n

Karin Wanrooij’s project “The effect of reduced pronunciations on understanding a second language<\/em>” was financed by the NWO division “the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research” (NRO<\/a>). Read all information about the project and its results or watch the webvideo’s with the results on the page “Vaardig Verstaan<\/a><\/strong><\/span>” (in Dutch).<\/p>\n

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PhD project (completed 2015)<\/h3>\n

The PhD project (“Distributional learning of vowel categories in infants and adults”<\/em>)\u00a0examined to what extent\u00a0mere exposure to ambient speech (“distributional learning”) contributes to learning the vowels of a language, both in infancy, when the mother tongue must be acquired, and in adulthood, when new languages can be learned. The results are based on neurophysiological and behavioural experiments, and on an extensive literature review of possible neural correlates.\u00a0The main conclusions are that (1) distributional learning can contribute to the acquisition of native vowel categories in infancy, (2) the capacity for distributional learning is larger in infancy than in adulthood, and (3) observed effects of distributional training in the lab may not be based on the number of peaks in the training distributions. The thesis can be downloaded here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0research was part of Paul Boersma’s NWO-funded Vici-project “Emergent Categories and Connections<\/a>“.\u00a0It\u00a0was also\u00a0part\u00a0of the ‘Hoe Leren Baby’s ( How\u00a0Do Babies Learn<\/em> ) project’ at the University of Amsterdam. In this project the departments of Developmental Psychology and Phonetic Sciences cooperate to study the cognitive and linguistic development of babies.<\/p>\n

Media<\/h3>\n