Ocke-Schwen Bohn
Ocke-Schwen Bohn is a professor of English Linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark. He specializes in phonetics and psycholinguistics, especially second language and cross-language speech perception, foreign accented speech, and infant speech perception, and he has also conducted work on the phonetics of an endangered language, on interlanguage intelligibility, and on language in autobiographical memory. Bohn currently serves as member of the editorial board of Journal of Phonetics and Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics. He also organized the 2016 edition of the International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech conference.
Biography
Bohn received an M.A. in English and Geography from Kiel University in 1979, and Ph.D. in English Linguistics from Kiel University in 1984. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship on an NIH grant at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1989. Since 1996, he has been professor of English Linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Research
Bohn is internationally recognized for his research on infant speech perception, cross-language speech perception, vowel perception, and second language speech. Bohn's collaborations in these areas have resulted in the influential Speech Learning Model and its revision, in insights on infant, native, and cross-language vowel perception, in the discovery of universal patterns of infant vowel perception, and in the study of cross-language perception of a range of consonants and vowels. Bohn is probably best known for his Desensitization Hypothesis and for his work on the Natural Referent Vowel framework. His work on second language speech has provided support for the assumption that the capacity for phonetic category formation remains intact over the life-span.