Mara van der Ploeg

Mara van der Ploeg is a researcher at the Faculty of Arts, affiliated with the Neurolinguistics and Language Development (NLD) group. Her work intersects applied linguistics, neurolinguistics, and gerontology, focusing on late-life language acquisition, cognitive benefits of education for seniors, and phonetic processing in multilingual contexts.

• Expertise in third-age language learning, plurilingual pedagogies, and speech intelligibility
• Active in English-medium instruction research and phonetic convergence studies
• Recipient of Gratama Grant and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Grant (2019)

Her recent publications emphasize autonomous learning in seniors, language instruction methodologies, and cognitive stimulation through education. Collaborations span institutions like the University of Florida and focus on implicit-explicit language learning frameworks.

Notable contributions include:

• Studying formant adaptation in Dutch children (2023)
• Investigating alcohol's impact on pronunciation in L1 vs. L2 (2019)
• Proposing innovative pedagogical models for seniors (2019)