Aoju Chen
Institute for Language Sciences, Utrecht University
Aoju Chen, professor of Language Development at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is a leading researcher in speech prosody and interdisciplinary research on prosody acquisition in a first and second language. She is the holder of several major grants for research on prosody and prosodic development. She and her lab have worked extensively on the production, perception, and processing of prosodic meaning and acquisition of prosody in a first and second language from a cross-linguistic perspective. She put forward the first cross-linguistic model of the acquisition of prosodic focus marking. Current research in her lab bridges speech prosody with language development, foetal learning, and neuroscience, and explores the interaction between innate biases in prosodic production and perception with input-driven learning mechanisms in prosodic development before birth and in the first three years of life. Aoju Chen was a visiting researcher at Edinburgh University (2002/3) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016), and a visiting professor at the 2011 LSA Linguistic Institute (University of Colorado at Boulder). She served as an associate editor of Laboratory Phonology (2026-2022) and is currently an elected board member of the ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Special Interest Group on Speech Prosody.