James Emil Flege, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (USA). He carried out research on speech acquisition at UAB from 1981 until 2006 under the auspices of grants from the National Institutes of Health. He moved to Italy following retirement but resumed professional activities in 2017. Since then he has authored chapters dealing with L2 speech learning, one being a revision of the Speech Learning Model, or SLM-r, in collaboration with Ocke-Schwen Bohn. Other work in progress regards the development of methods for obtaining characteristic L2 speech samples, a test of category formation using the MMN technique, and an evaluation of the “L1 category precision hypothesis” proposed by SLM-r as a means for explaining inter-subject variability in the production and perception of L2 sounds.

Title of the talk: A distributional learning account of L2 speech learning. (ABSTRACT)

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