"Say 'sploital'."

It's not a real word. Professor Linda Ruth Wheeldon tries to explain something fundamental about phonology, that is, the study of sounds in language.

She will also share details about the PAAL project, which has just secured NOK 120 million from the European Research Council for a study span of the next six years. 38 million of this fund is allocated to the University of Agder (UiA).

"Sploital," I say.

"Now say 'sploital' without the 'p' sound."

"...sloital?"

"See, you did that quickly and efficiently," says Wheeldon, who is a professor at UiA.

Feeling rather self-satisfied, I listen to the rest of her explanation. About how researchers can give children three words and ask them which ones rhyme. How they can ask them about the number of syllables in a word. And that how well children perform on such tests can predict their future reading abilities.

"But what is it within us that these properties utilise? What does it mean to be good at phonology? Why are you good at taking the 'p' sound out of 'sploital'? What do you know better than others about sound structures and how they can be manipulated? We don't know," says Wheeldon.

What we don't think about when we talk

Even though we don't consciously consider it on a daily basis, speaking requires large amounts of subconscious knowledge. Our language is also more varied than we assume.

The pronunciation of a word can change depending on whether it is spoken by a native speaker or someone who learned the language later. It can vary among different dialects. It can vary depending on whether a man or a woman is speaking, or a child or an adult.

"The pronunciation varies even when we speak ourselves; you cannot say the same word in exactly the same way three times," said Wheeldon's colleague, Professor Allison Wetterlin.

Yet, we understand each other, in part thanks to what researchers call phonological representations – a mental lexicon of all the words we recognise in our language.

As infants, we learn which sounds are vital in forming words. This gives us a subconscious understanding of which sounds and combinations of sounds belong in our language.

"We intuitively know which sounds belong in our language. For example, Norwegian speakers can immediately know that 'ngat' is not a Norwegian word, even if they've never heard it before. We call this phonological cognition," says Wheeldon.

Researchers believe that the mental lexicon and our inner perception of sound work together. If they figure out how, it could shed new light on everything from learning to read and write, to language difficulties and speech technology.

Fort Knox with wooden chairs

I sat with Wheeldon and Wetterlin just a few weeks after they defended their application in front of a 26-person panel at the European Research Council offices in Brussels, the last step in the drawn-out application process for an ERC Synergy Grant.

Such an award is highly esteemed – only three of the projects given the green light this year involve participants from Norwegian institutions. Out of 548 applications, only 57 made the cut.

"That's the difference between Allison and me. She's very positive, while I apply thinking I'll never succeed. As an academic, disappointment is a significant part of the job," Wetterlin says with a laugh.

This type of award is bestowed upon projects that are so ambitious that they cannot be tackled by one research team alone. Therefore, Professors Wheeldon and Wetterlin from the University of Agder faced the panel together with two partners their application was co-written with: Professor Paula Fikkert from Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Professor Aditi Lahiri from the University of Oxford in England.

"And there we were, behind a security detail reminiscent of Fort Knox, on wooden chairs against the wall in front of a room filled with 26 panel members, plus people on Zoom, and a crowd of ERC administration attendees keen to witness it," recounts Wetterlin.

The intense security and interest reflect the prestige involved in a Synergy Grant. And for once, disappointment wasn't part of the academic everyday life.

"High-level basic research"

There is celebration across the entire UiA following the award. Rector Sunniva Whittaker points out that an ERC Synergy Grant is the most prestigious part of the ERC programme, wherein funds are allocated solely based on the quality of the project.

"This is high-level basic research that contributes to understanding how sound recognition and sound production are learned. We are very proud of this academic environment that has been built up over a long time with strong support from both the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation and from the Faculty of Humanities and Education," says Whittaker.

The project is expected to involve a total of eight postdoctoral fellows and two doctoral students spread across the three institutions.

"One of the major benefits of the project is that we train a new generation of researchers who will gain both highly specialised and broad knowledge of phonology, " says Wetterlin.

Five things the researchers want to know more about:

Understanding spoken language: How does our internal sound perception help us comprehend different accents, dialects and other languages?

How children learn to use speech sounds: What happens when children learn to connect sounds to letters and words? How does this help them become proficient readers and writers?

Learning other languages: How much of the phonological representation and cognition can be transferred to a new language, and what determines if this is successful?

How and why speech sounds change: Why do speech sounds change over time? Is it our sound perception that drives these changes?

The connection between sound and writing in different languages: How do the sounds in a language correlate with the letters? And how does this vary between different writing systems?

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

• The full name of the project is 'Phonological cognisance and allied linguistic representations: acquisition, bilingualism, change and script' (PAAL).
• It has received a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) of €10 million (NOK 120 million). NOK 38 million of the budget go to UiA.
• A collaboration between the University of Agder, Radboud University in the Netherlands, and the University of Oxford in England.
• The project lasts for six years.