John H. G. Scott

Back Story
Thanks to the U.S. Navy, I was born in Bermuda and lived in Rhode Island and Alaska's Aleutian Islands before spending most of my childhood in Washington's Puget Sound area.  I grew up frequently hiking and camping in the Olympic and Cascade mountains.  The summer after graduating high school, I visited Germany for the first time with a GAPP program in Tuttlingen, Baden-Württemberg.  My college years were spent mostly in Seattle, except for a year studying abroad in Freiburg, also in Baden-Württemberg.  I spent several years in Seattle after graduation, and then moved to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school.  Since then, I have spent time abroad in Reykjavik, Iceland as well as Krefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg.  My family and I returned to mountain views and wilderness hikes when we moved to Calgary, Alberta in 2019.  In summer of 2023, we road-tripped the Trans-Canada Highway from Banff to Niagara Falls on our way to our new adventures between the Appalachians and the Atlantic shore around Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

Education
I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle after earning a B.A. in Linguistics with a minor in Music and a B.A. in German Language & Literature with a History minor.  After several years out in the work force, I returned to school and earned my M.A. in Germanic Studies at Indiana University.  At IU, I pursued an interdisciplinary training in historical linguistics, phonological theory, second language acquisition in general, and psycholinguistic experimental approaches to L2 phonology specifically.  I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Second Language Studies in May 2019, with outside minors in Linguistics and Germanic Studies.

Research Interests

Second & Third Language Phonology
As a researcher of second-language (L2) phonology, I try to consider both the abstract arrangement of language sounds (general phonology) and specific problems of learnability when adults encounter new patterns in L2, such as the interactions between phonology and orthography in L2 and L3 contexts. The research we conduct in the L2+ Sound Learning Lab embraces the fundamental concerns of phonetics (study of the structure of language sounds), psycholinguistic experiment techniques, theoretical and empirical principles of category perception, and the role of position-sensitivity (i.e., where a sound occurs within a word) in acquisition and how phonological and phonotactic knowledge is represented in the brain. More broadly, my background emphasizes phonology (synchronic and diachronic), including historical Germanic languages and Optimality Theoretic approaches, speech perception, and L2 lexical acquisition.

Phonetic Training for Foreign Language Learners
A rapidly growing area of applied linguistics research entails fostering early foreign language acquisition (FLA) through enhanced phonetic training, i.e., listening to carefully structured sounds to enhance one's ability to differentiate between sounds in the foreign language.  This can be done with many voices (high variability) or one voice (low variability), it can be done with beginners or more advanced learners, and it can be done in fewer, intense training sessions or in a gradual trickle over weeks. My current research project in this area (“Multi-Voice Aural Training for Adult Learners' Perception of Foreign Sounds & Spelling”) is funded by Insight Development Grant #430-2021-00157 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Language Standardization and Policy
In addition to my central research areas, I am increasingly interested in the history of how languages (e.g., German) become standardized, the impacts of literacy on linguistic knowledge (epistemological) and on culture (positive and negative), and external factors that influence the field of language education (e.g., politics, funding, cultural attitudes about foreign languages, language purity).

L2+ Sound Learning Lab
Our current research at the L2+ Sound Learning Lab is a project entitled Multi-Voice Aural Training for Adult Learners' Perception of Foreign Sounds and Spelling funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC Insight Development Grant 430-2021-00157).  We are investigating the acquisition of German consonants, vowels, and alphabetic literacy by Anglophone L2/L3 learners, both with and without prior experience with French, a common variable in western Canada. This research employs psycholinguistic experimental methods to measure the effect of targeted aural-phonetic training on how adult learners come to associate familiar and novel speech sounds with German spelling orthography, as well as the impact on vocabulary learning by early-stage foreign language learners.