Prof. dr. René Kager

Emeritus Professor
Language acquisition, processing and disorders
r.w.j.kager@uu.nl

René Kager is a theoretical phonologist and infant language acquisition researcher. In his theoretical work, he focusses on metrical word stress and phonotactics in optimality theory. In his acquisition research, he addresses the early perception of word-prosodic properties, such as tone, stress and rhythm, and of segmental contrasts, in monolingual and bilingual infants. He is also involved in modelling aspects of phonological acquisition through artificial language learning studies. He has received several large national grants, including a Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) VICI grant (2005-2010) on the role of phonotactics in speech segmentation. Currently, he is a PI in the Consortium on Individual Development.

Chair
English Linguistics and Phonology
Inaugural lecture date
16.02.2007