Dr L.J. van Maastricht (Lieke)

At the Department of Language and Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen, I teach various courses on Spanish Business Communication, as well as Phonetics. As a researcher affiliated with the Centre for Language Studies, my research is focused on the facilitating effect of gestures on the acquisition of the prosody of a foreign language. This is in line with my PhD research, in which I looked at whether Dutch L2 learners are able to acquire the intonation and rhythm of Spanish (and vice versa) and which factors play a determining role in this process, such as the learning direction (learning Spanish from Dutch or vice versa) and the complexity of the language property to be learned (intonation or rhythm). In addition to my work at Radboud University, I am on the board of the Dutch Association for Phonetic Sciences (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen).

• Gestures in Second Language Acquisition

• Speech Production and Comprehension