René Willibrord Joseph Kager (; born 17 July 1957) is a Dutch linguist and Chair of English Linguistics and Phonology at

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public university, public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of ...

. He is known for his works on

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

Career

Kager is a theoretical phonologist and works on child language acquisition. In his theoretical work he focuses on metric word stress and phonotactics in

optimality theory Optimality theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which ty ...

and early perception of word prosodic properties such as tone, stress and rhythm, and segmental contrasts, in monolingual and bilingual infants. He is also involved in modeling aspects of phonological acquisition through artificial language learning studies. He has received several major national grants, including a VICI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (2005-2010) on the role of phonotactics in speech segmentation. He is currently a Principal investigator in the Consortium on Individual Development.

Books

* ''Optimality Theory''. Cambridge University Press. 1999

References

Phonologists from the Netherlands Living people Academic staff of Utrecht University Linguists from the Netherlands 1957 births {{Netherlands-linguist-stub