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Senior Researcher in Residence

Jonathan Harrington, Professor of Phonetics and Digital Language Processing at the LMU, is conducting research on "The relationship between sound change, language acquisition and prosodic weakness". The central question is to what extent sound change can be traced back to characteristics of the language production and perception of children. Professor Harrington and his team will investigate the coordination of fricative consonants and vowels in children whose native languages are German and Polish, i.e. the question of how a certain group of consonants, the so-called fricative consonants such as "f" or "s", can be influenced by vowels which follow them. Their investigations will be used to test the hypothesis that unstable relationships between the production and the perception of language can be the cause of changes in the spoken language.