Daan van Soeren, University of Groningen

Daan van Soeren’s dissertation project is carried out within the framework of Columbia School Phonology, more commonly known as Phonology as Human Behaviour (PHB; Diver 2012), which argues that the phonology of languages is shaped the balance between maximum communication and minimal effort.

He recently published a paper on word stress as a relevant factor in the distribution of phonemes. When comparing the distribution of consonants in Spanish, English and Dutch words that start with either a stressed or an unstressed syllable, the results undeniably show different distributional patterns for the two word types.

This year, he also carried out a word priming experiment in Spain. The preliminary results suggest that stress information in the first syllable is used in the recognition of Spanish words; the stressed fragment ‘ar–’ seems to prime ‘arco’ and not archivo’ (bold indicates stress).

For the 2022-2023 Fellowship, his research will address relevant issues raised in previous work in PHB, such as the validity of the phoneme as a construct.