Bethany Stoddard, M.A.
Research Assistant
Young German Learner English: Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency
PhD Student
I am a PhD student and Research Assistant (“Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin”) on the project Young German Learner English: Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency, supervised by Prof. Dr. Robert Fuchs.
My research interests include psycholinguistics as well as first- and second-language acquisition. I am particularly drawn to the syntax-discourse interface in acquisition—in other words, the way that sentence structure and contextual knowledge are integrated in a learner’s language system. My work has utilized various quantitative methods from the domains of psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics.
In my doctoral dissertation, I investigate the use of the dative and benefactive alternations by young German learners of English. By looking at the early stages of acquisition of these structures, I aim to contribute to our understanding of second language acquisition processes. Specifically, this research would shed light on the effects of cross-linguistic influence from L1 on the production of similar structures in L2.
Curriculum Vitae
2024-present Research Assistant (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin), "DFG Project “Young German Learner English: Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency”
Prof. Dr. Robert Fuchs, University of Bonn
2023 - 2024 Research Assistant (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin), DFG Project “Young German Learner English: Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency”
Prof. Dr. Robert Fuchs, University of Hamburg
2022 - 2023 Lab Manager/Research Assistant, Communication and Development Lab
Prof. Dr. Umay Suanda, University of Connecticut
2019 - 2019; 2021 - 2022 Research Assistant (Studentische/Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft), German as a Second Language Lab
Prof. Dr. Petra Schulz & Dr. Merle Weicker, Goethe-University Frankfurt
2017 - 2018; 2019 - 2020 Research Assistant, Phonetics Lab
Prof. Dr. John Kingston, University of Massachusetts Amherst
2018 - 2018 Smith College Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Language Acquisition Lab
Prof. Dr. Jill de Villiers and Prof. Dr. Peter de Villiers, Smith College
2020 - 2023 MA in Linguistics, with a focus on psycholinguistics, Goethe-University Frankfurt,
2016 - 2020 BA in Linguistics and German Studies, Smith College
Oct. 2020 - Aug. 2021 Fulbright Open Study/Research Award
2020 Steuben-Schurz-Gesellschaft Berlin Airlift-Scholarship
2020 Smith College Anita Luria Ascher Memorial Prize
2018 - 2019 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship
SoSe 24: Recent Trends in Applied Linguistics - Übung
Publication
Presentations
Stoddard, B. & de Villiers, J. (2021). Children's sensitivity to prosody and ostension in answers to wh-questions. In D. Dionne & L. Vidal Covas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 707–720). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Bracke, L., Stoddard, B., Fuchs, R., Rosen, A. & Werner, V. (2024, March 21–22). Introducing the Corpus of Young German Learner English [Conference presentation]. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Hannover, Germany.
Williams, J., Schoener, N., Stoddard, B. & Suanda, S. H. (2023, March 25). Learning words From referentially ambiguous naming events: Evidence from a new artificial word learning paradigm [Conference presentation]. Society for Research in Child Development, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Stoddard, B. (2020). “Wo schläft wer?” The problem german questions pose for theories of learnability [Conference presentation]. Five College German Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium, Amherst College.