Hi! My name is Megan Dailey, and I joined Dr. Audrey Bürki Foschini’s team in February 2025 as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Phonetics and Psycholinguistics on the L2 Spell grant, co-funded by the French Agence Nationale de Recherche and the Swiss National Science Foundation. We are currently investigating how orthographic information (spellings) influences the development of second language (L2) speech sound representations and productions in L2 word learning.
I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL University in Paris, where I led a project on adult bilingual speech perception at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique. My interest in language and cognition was first nourished at The Ohio State University, where I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and French, before I continued my academic adventure as a Master’s student in the Cognitive Science Master’s program at ENS – PSL University in Paris.
I am in awe of humans’ extraordinary propensity for language learning through all stages of life. In my research, I seek to uncover all that adult bilinguals know about the speech sounds of their second (third, fifth, tenth) language – how they perceive and produce them, what individual and learning factors lead to their acquisition, to what extent they build a non-native sociolinguistic repertoire (acquire non-native accents and speech styles), and how all of this knowledge affects language processes such as word recognition and sentence processing.