Dr. Carrie Ankerstein

Dr. Ankerstein will be a Visiting Professor at Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan, from October of 2024 until September of 2025

Routeburn Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand
Routeburn Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

Dr. Carrie Ankerstein

Senior Lecturer ("Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben")

Areas of interest/expertise: Psycholinguistics and Applied Linguistics

Courses: Introduction to English Linguistics, English Phonetics and Phonology, Proseminars in Psycholinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Advanced Written Expression, and Research Methods

Office Hours: by appointment (email me).

Email: c.ankerstein(at)mx.uni-saarland.de

Tel.: +49 (0)681 302 2083

I joined the English Department at Saarland University in the Winter Semester of 2008-2009. I hold a BA in German Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Certificate in German Philology from the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany. I completed my post-graduate studies in England with an MPhil in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Psycholinguistics from the University of Sheffield. In 2015-2016 I was a Visiting Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh and in 2020-2021 I was a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. My research interests are in second language acquisition, in particular how we process words and sentences in our native and non-native languages and the perception and production of non-native speech sounds.

Letters of Recommendation: Before you ask me for a letter of recommendation, please read through this document.

Research Interests:

  • Implicit Language Processing
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • Language and Thought
  • AI Tools and Language Teaching

Current Projects:

  • ChatGPT in the ESL Classroom
  • Online syntactic parsing in non-native speakers of English (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation)
  • Semantic priming in a second language

Selected Publications:

Ankerstein, C. A. (2024). ChatGPT and Me: implementing and evaluating a custom GPT for written corrective feedback. Ubiquity Proceedings, 4(1), 32, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/uproc.154

Ankerstein, C.A. (2024). Inside Bo Burnham: Timelessly Capturing the Zeitgeist. In: Bernardi, V., Giammanco, A.D., & Mißler, H. (Eds.) Covid-19 in Film and Television: Watching the Pandemic. Routledge.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2024). A machine that still doesn’t quite understand us: putting ChatGPT to the test. English Today. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078423000433

Ankerstein, C.A. (2020). The Joy of Making Mistaeks – the imperfect polyglot. TESOLANZ News, 35(2), 8.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2019). The perpetuation of prescriptivism in popular culture. English Today, 35(3), 55-60.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2017). The role of the native language in foreign accents: Germans are not aiming for a fossilized form of English: a response to Booth (2015). English Today, 33(4), 30-32.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2014). A psycholinguistic measurement of second language proficiency: The coefficient of variation (pp. 109-121). In Leclercq, P., Edmonds A., & Hilton H. (Eds.) Measuring L2 proficiency: perspectives from SLA. Multilingual Matters: Bristol.

Ankerstein, C.A. & Morschett, R. (2013). Do you hear what I hear?: A comparison of phoneme perception in native and Saarlandian German nonnative speakers of English. Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics, 4, 1-8.

Ankerstein, C.A. (2011). Qualitatively similar automatic semantic priming in native and nonnative speakers. Proceedings of the fourth ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics ExLing 2011, 11-14.