Staff Profiles

Undergraduate

• U70015 Language Acquisition
• U70036 Cognitive Linguistics
• U70081 Psycholinguistics

Postgraduate (MA TESOL)

• P70016 Language Acquisition
• P70017 ELT Changing Methodologies

Supervision

Available to supervise dissertations in the areas of Psycholinguistics, First and Second Language Acqusition and Bilingualism

Sandra’s main research interests lie in the area of lexical storage and morphological and phonological processing, especially with regards to bilingual processing. One particular research topic she is currently setting out to investigate is the effect a dominant second language has on the first language system in late adult bilinguals.

Research group membership

Applied Linguistics Research Group

Research projects

Member of MORPHON (ERC-funded Advanced Grant to Prof. A. Lahiri) in the Language and Brain Lab (University of Oxford)

Further information

My profile on the Language and Brain Lab website

Journal articles

• Kotzor S, Molineaux BJ, Banks E, Lahiri A, '"Fake" gemination in suffixed words and compounds in English and German'
  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 140 (2016) pp.356-367
  ISSN: 0001-4966 eISSN: 1520-8524
  Abstract In languages with an underlying consonantal length contrast, the most salient acoustic cue differentiating singletons and geminates is duration of closure. When concatenation of identical phonemes through affixation or compounding produces “fake” geminates, these may or may not be realized phonetically as true geminates. English and German no longer have a productive length contrast in consonants, but do allow sequences of identical consonants in certain morphological contexts, e.g., suffixation (green-ness; zahl-los “countless”) or compounding (pine nut; Schul-leiter “headmaster”). The question is whether such concatenated sequences are produced as geminates and realized acoustically with longer closure duration, and whether this holds in both languages. This issue is investigated here by analyzing the acoustics of native speakers reading suffixed and compound words containing both fake geminate and non-geminate consonants in similar phonological environments. Results indicate that the closure duration is consistently nearly twice as long for fake geminates across conditions. In addition, voice onset time is proportionally longer for fake geminates in English while vowel duration shows few significant differences (in German sonorants only). These results suggest that English and German speakers articulate fake geminates with acoustic characteristics similar to those found in languages with an underlying length contrast, despite no longer displaying the contrast morpheme-internally.Website 

Recent publications

Lahiri, A. & Kotzor, S. (eds) (2017). The Speech Processing Lexicon: Neurocognitive and behavioural approaches. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kotzor, S., Wetterlin, A., & Lahiri, A. (2017). Symmetry or asymmetry: Evidence for underspecification in the mental lexicon. In: A. Lahiri & S. Kotzor, The Speech Processing Lexicon: Neurocognitive and behavioural approaches. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 85-106.

Kotzor, S., Wetterlin, A. & Lahiri, A. (2017). Bengali Geminates: Processing and representation. In: H. Kubozono (ed.), The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 187-203.

Ehrenhofer, L., Roberts, A.C., Kotzor, S., Wetterlin, A., & Lahiri, A. (2017). Asymmetric processing of consonant duration in Swiss German. In: H. Kubozono (ed.), The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 204-229.

Kotzor, S., Wetterlin, A., Roberts, A.C., & Lahiri, A. (2016). Processing of Phonemic Consonant Length: Semantic and Fragment Priming Evidence from Bengali. Language and Speech, 59:83-112.

 

Membership of professional bodies

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Conferences

Recent conferences

2017

Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Wynne, H.S.Z., Lahiri, A. Form vs. morphological complexity in L1 and L2 processing. Conference on Multilingualism (COM2017), Groningen, Netherlands, 6-8 November 2017.

Wynne, Hilary S.Z., Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Lahiri, A. Modality-related issues in the processing of morphologically-complex words: Evidence from Bengali. Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLAP), Lancaster, 7-9 September 2017.

Wynne, Hilary S.Z., Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Lahiri, A. Processing of morphologically complex words: Evidence from Bengali. 11th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, Nicosia, Cypress, 22-25 June 2017.

Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Wynne, H.S.Z., Lahiri, A. Form vs. morphological complexity in L1 and L2 processing. 10th International Morphological Processing Conference (MoProc), Trieste, Italy, 22-24 June 2017.

Zhou, B., Wynne, H.S.Z., Kotzor, S., Lahiri, A. Form Priming and its Interaction with Morphological Processing. 10th International Morphological Processing Conference (MoProc), Trieste, Italy, 22-24 June 2017.

 

 

2016

Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Alter, K. & Lahiri, A. Place and height mismatch in vowels: MMN evidence. 10th Mental Lexicon Conference, University of Ottawa, Canada, October 19-21. (Poster presentation)

Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Alter, K. & Lahiri, A. Place and height mismatch in vowels: MMN evidence. 8th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, London, UK, August 17-20. (Poster presentation)

 

2015

Kotzor, S., A.C. Roberts, A. Wetterlin & A. Lahiri. Perception and representation of Bengali nasal vowels. 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2015, Glasgow, 10-14 August. (Poster presentation)

 

2014

Kotzor, S., A. C. Roberts, A. Wetterlin, & A. Lahiri. Pre-attentive processing of duration contrasts: an MMN study. 9th Mental Lexicon Conference (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, September 30 - October 3. (Poster presentation)

Kotzor, S., A. C. Roberts, A. Wetterlin, & A. Lahiri. Pre-attentive processing of duration contrasts: an MMN study. Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2014, Amsterdam, August 27-29. (Poster presentation)

Roberts, A. C., S. Kotzor, A. Wetterlin, & A. Lahiri. Cross-linguistic differences in automatic perception of allophonic vowel duration. Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2014, Amsterdam, August 27-29. (Poster presentation)

Wetterlin, A., A. C. Roberts, S. Kotzor, J. Koreman, & A. Lahiri. Asymmetric processing of word accent in Norwegian. Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2014, Amsterdam, August 27-29. (Poster presentation)

Roberts, A. C., S. Kotzor, A. Wetterlin & A. Lahiri. Neurolinguistic evidence for asymmetric processing of consonant duration. Laboratory Phonology, NINJAL, Tokyo, July 25-27. (Oral presentation)