Isabelle Darcy

Meet the Faculty

Assistant Professor, Second Language Studies

Education

Ph.D. 2003. Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
M.A. German and Romance Linguistics and Literature

Contact Information

e-mail: idarcy@indiana.edu
office: Memorial Hall 301
phone: (812) 855-0033

Research Interests

Second language phonology and processing; acquisition of phonology; accent; speech perception; word recognition.

Personal Statement

Isabelle Darcy is Assistant Professor of Second Language Phonology and Processing with the Indiana University Department of Second Language Studies. After completing a Franco-German Master's Degree in German and Romance Linguistics and Literature, she obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (France) and from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany), for which she was awarded an Outstanding Dissertation Award from the University of Mainz. She has worked as a postdoctoral research and teaching associate at the Universities of Potsdam and Tuebingen (Germany).

One of the big challenges for research investigating language as a cognitive faculty is to determine which aspects of our linguistic behavior and structures are part of one's biological endowment for language - thus relying on mechanisms that are specifically adapted to linguistic processing - and which might result from general properties of human cognition. Isabelle Darcy's field of investigation is at the crossroads of experimental psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. Her current research interest is centered on the acquisition and the representation of linguistic sound systems in a wide range of populations, infants and young children acquiring their first language, adults acquiring a second language, or patients with linguistic pathologies.

Please also visit Professor Darcy's professional website hosted by the University of Potsdam.

Courses Recently Taught

T 500 Second Language Speech Perception and Foreign Accent
T 514 English Phonolgy for Teaching Pronunciation
S 605 Second Language Speech Processing (with Professor Laurent Dekydtspotter)
S 600 Learnability (with Laurent Dekydtspotter)
S 512 Second Language Phonology

Publications

Isabelle Darcy, Sharon Peperkamp, Emmanuel Dupoux (2007) "Bilinguals play by the rules. Perceptual compensation for assimilation in late L2-learners". In Cole, Jennifer and José I. Hualde (eds.). Laboratory Phonology 9 (pp. 411-442). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Isabelle Darcy, Frank Kügler (2007) "Phonological context effects for voicing and devoicing in French". In Trouvain, Jürgen and William J. Barry (eds.). Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1257-1260). Saarbrücken.

Isabelle Darcy, Franck Ramus, Anne Christophe, Katherine Kinzler, & Emmanuel Dupoux, (to appear) "Phonological knowledge in compensation for native and non-native assimilation". In: F. Kügler, C. Féry & R. van de Vijver (eds.) Variation and Gradience in Phonetics and Phonology. Mouton De Gruyter.

Isabelle Darcy (to appear) "Representation of phonological alternations in a first and a second language: a preliminary report". Proceedings of SLRF 2007.