Lawrence University Psychologist Awarded Fulbright Grant for Research in Denmark

APPLETON, WIS. -- A Lawrence University psychologist specializing in the perception of speech and sound has been awarded an $18,000 fellowship by the Fulbright Scholar Program for a teaching and research position in Denmark.

Terry Rew-Gottfried, professor of psychology, will spend the fall 2001 academic term in the English department of Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, teaching courses on the psychology of language and speech science.

The Fulbright fellowship will support a collaborative research project Rew Gottfried will conduct with Ocke-Schwen Bohn at the Institut for Engelsk Filologi. Their research study will focus on native speakers of Danish and their perception of Danish and English vowels and whether the identification of vowels is affected by the speaking rate of the surrounding sentence context. The research has implications for theories of speech processing across many different languages and ramifications for second language learning and speech perception.

Rew-Gottfried has spent 20 years investigating the effect of second-language learning on listeners' ability to identify and discriminate unfamiliar speech sounds, how acoustic characteristics of different languages differ with the context in which they are spoken as well as the relationship of musical ability and second-language learning.

"I've never been able to conduct this kind of research in Europe, where people commonly learn two or three languages, so the opportunity to do so and with Danish colleagues is truly exciting," said Rew-Gottfried. "Although Danish is related to English, there are considerable and interesting differences that might help us understand how native and non-native listeners perceive the sounds of the two languages.

"My family is also looking forward to living in Denmark for an extended period of time, although my children are a little nervous about going to school there since Danish is the primary language of instruction. Fortunately, most Danes also speak excellent English and I'm hoping we'll learn enough Danish to understand and communicate fairly easily. In some respects wešll be a little like participants in my own research."

Rew-Gottfried received the only "open award" available for study in Denmark through the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), which administers the Fulbright Scholar Program for U.S. faculty and professionals. He was selected from research proposals submitted in disciplines ranging from the sciences to the fine arts. Established in 1946, the Fulbright Scholar Program provides grants for teaching and research positions in more than 120 countries worldwide.

Rew-Gottfried is the second Lawrence faculty member this year to be awarded a Fulbright fellowship. In March, Daniel Taylor, Hiram A. Jones Professor of Classics, was awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistics at the University of Trieste in Italy.

A member of the Lawrence faculty since 1985, Rew-Gottfried has also conducted research on memory, including eyewitness memory and the use of perceptual imagery in improving recall. He earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Minnesota.