James Emil (Jim) Flege, Ph.D
Professor Emeritus
Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
e-mail: jeflege@uab.edu
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950, a third-generation German-American. After
graduating from St. Xavier High school in Cincinnati in 1968, I attended John Carroll
University in Cleveland, Oho and the Rome campus of Loyola University, graduating with
a BA in English and French in 1972.
The year after graduating from college, I studied General Linguistics and Psychology at
the University of Geneva on a Fulbright grant. Then, after a year in the "real" world selling
books for Little, Brown and delivering mail for the US Postal Service, I began graduate
school. Following an MA degree in Linguistics (University of Florida, 1975), I obtained MA
and PhD degrees (1977, 1979), also in Linguistics, from Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana. My research specialization was Experimental Phonetics. Robert F.
(Bob) Port was my thesis advisor.
As far as I know, my Ph.D thesis at Indiana was the first to focus on phonetic aspects of
second language (L2) acquisition. Having developed a taste for empirical research, and
finding little of interest to me in the field of Linguistics, I spent three years as an NIH
post-doctoral trainee in Speech and Hearing Sciences, first at University of Florida
(1980), and then at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (1981-1982).
Following these three very rewarding years of post-doctoral research, I was hired as an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Biocommunication at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham (UAB).
There were two things that made my first -- and, as it turned out, only -- academic job
unusual. The first was the name of the department I joined. At most other universities, it
would have been called a "Speech and Hearing Sciences" department, or the like. Then
there the fact that this department was housed in the School of Medicine of a univeristy
located in the Deep South, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
I was very lucky to have found my way to UAB. The most important and unique aspect of
my new job was its very nature. I had somehow managed to find a job that, by all rights,
could not possibly exist: a hard money, tenure track position with access to good
research facilities and no teaching responsibilities!
Given my lack of interest in the things that most Southern men enjoy (football, hunting,
fishing, NASCAR racing), I was left with a dangerous amount of free time on my hands. I
used a lot of that time to write grant proposals. Despite the lack of previous experience, I
turned out to be good at it, and managed to obtain my first research grant from the
National Institutes of Health less than two years after arriving in Birmingham.
The funds provided by this initial NIH grant, and those that followed, allowed me to recruit
a number of very capable and energetic young researchers from North America, Europe,
Australia and Asia. The NIH grants also allowed me and my research team to venture
beyond Birmingham in order to recruit participants for behavioral research examining L2
speech learning. We collected data in various American states and Puerto Rico, and also
in Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Finland, Italy and The Netherlands.
My academic career flourished. We moved into a larger lab, and I was promoted to full
Professor in 1995. I was fortunate in finding very capable collaborators. With Grace
Yeni-Komshian of the University of Maryland, I carried out a large-scale study of Korean
immigrants to the US. With Ian R. A. MacKay, I carried out major research examining
Italian immigrants living in the Ottawa, ON region.
Contact with the native Italian participants in our Ottawa research, and exposure to large
doses of Italian-accented English -- one of the variables we studied in that research --
made me yearn to return to Italy where I had spent my junior year of college. In 1995, I
spent a part-year sabbatical at the Phonetics Institute of the Italian National Research
Council (CNR) in Padua, Italy. Thereafter, I became a frequent visitor to Italy.
Several years later I met my future wife, Tullia, in Rome, and began visiting Italy with even
greater frequency. As my research career at UAB approached its end, I had the
opportunity, thanks to Cristina Burani, to spend a year as a visiting researcher at the CNR
in Rome. I began telling people that I "commuted" between Birmingham, Alabama and
Rome. I read American newspapers flying East, and Italian newspapers flying West.
Before I knew it I had become Gold Medallion frequent flyer and was greeted by name by
the Delta flight attendants.
The periods I spent in Italy gradually grew longer. Tullia and I were married in the Spring
of 2005. At some point I stopped visiting Italy and began "visiting" the United States. One
morning in Rome I had an epiphany. As I travelled by bus to the CNR in Rome I looked at
all of the Asian and African immigrants around me. Then it struck me: the professor who
had spent a career studying immigrants to North America had himself become an
immigrant! An unintentional immigrant, to be sure, but a an immigrant nevertheless and
in every sense of the word.
Over the years I've written a lot about L2 acquisition. My research has led me and others
to question the belief that L2 learning is somehow doomed to failure if it occurs after the
end of "critical period." I'll admit to having had doubts about the so-called "critical period"
hypothesis at the beginning of my career, even before doing a lot of research. It always
seemed to me that most if not all adults who stuggle to learn an L2 lack the two crucial
advantages that every child learning an L1 possesses: a real opportunity to learn a
language through abundant direct contact with native speakers of the target language,
and a pressing need to learn it.
I retired from UAB in 2006 and became a resident of Tuscania in the same year. I now
had the OPPORTUNITY to learn Italian. I also had the other key ingredient--the NEED to
learn Italian--for few people in Tuscania speak English
Living in Tuscania also offered me the opportunity to experience first-hand something I
had studied academically for so many years. It gave me a chance to see what L2 learning
is like "on the inside". And I got to understand how it feels to struggle to make sense of
an unfamliar world around me, and to communicate, very awkwardly at first, in an L2.
photos: a wedding picture of me; Tullia: Giaki, our Jack Russell terrier; the arch near our home in
Tuscania; one of the thousands of Etruscan tombs around Tuscany; a portion of the medieval walls
surrounding Tuscania; the abandoned cloister of a local monastery; Jim, Tullia & Giaki
Professor Emeritus
Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
e-mail: jeflege@uab.edu
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950, a third-generation German-American. After
graduating from St. Xavier High school in Cincinnati in 1968, I attended John Carroll
University in Cleveland, Oho and the Rome campus of Loyola University, graduating with
a BA in English and French in 1972.
The year after graduating from college, I studied General Linguistics and Psychology at
the University of Geneva on a Fulbright grant. Then, after a year in the "real" world selling
books for Little, Brown and delivering mail for the US Postal Service, I began graduate
school. Following an MA degree in Linguistics (University of Florida, 1975), I obtained MA
and PhD degrees (1977, 1979), also in Linguistics, from Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana. My research specialization was Experimental Phonetics. Robert F.
(Bob) Port was my thesis advisor.
As far as I know, my Ph.D thesis at Indiana was the first to focus on phonetic aspects of
second language (L2) acquisition. Having developed a taste for empirical research, and
finding little of interest to me in the field of Linguistics, I spent three years as an NIH
post-doctoral trainee in Speech and Hearing Sciences, first at University of Florida
(1980), and then at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (1981-1982).
Following these three very rewarding years of post-doctoral research, I was hired as an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Biocommunication at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham (UAB).
There were two things that made my first -- and, as it turned out, only -- academic job
unusual. The first was the name of the department I joined. At most other universities, it
would have been called a "Speech and Hearing Sciences" department, or the like. Then
there the fact that this department was housed in the School of Medicine of a univeristy
located in the Deep South, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
I was very lucky to have found my way to UAB. The most important and unique aspect of
my new job was its very nature. I had somehow managed to find a job that, by all rights,
could not possibly exist: a hard money, tenure track position with access to good
research facilities and no teaching responsibilities!
Given my lack of interest in the things that most Southern men enjoy (football, hunting,
fishing, NASCAR racing), I was left with a dangerous amount of free time on my hands. I
used a lot of that time to write grant proposals. Despite the lack of previous experience, I
turned out to be good at it, and managed to obtain my first research grant from the
National Institutes of Health less than two years after arriving in Birmingham.
The funds provided by this initial NIH grant, and those that followed, allowed me to recruit
a number of very capable and energetic young researchers from North America, Europe,
Australia and Asia. The NIH grants also allowed me and my research team to venture
beyond Birmingham in order to recruit participants for behavioral research examining L2
speech learning. We collected data in various American states and Puerto Rico, and also
in Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Finland, Italy and The Netherlands.
My academic career flourished. We moved into a larger lab, and I was promoted to full
Professor in 1995. I was fortunate in finding very capable collaborators. With Grace
Yeni-Komshian of the University of Maryland, I carried out a large-scale study of Korean
immigrants to the US. With Ian R. A. MacKay, I carried out major research examining
Italian immigrants living in the Ottawa, ON region.
Contact with the native Italian participants in our Ottawa research, and exposure to large
doses of Italian-accented English -- one of the variables we studied in that research --
made me yearn to return to Italy where I had spent my junior year of college. In 1995, I
spent a part-year sabbatical at the Phonetics Institute of the Italian National Research
Council (CNR) in Padua, Italy. Thereafter, I became a frequent visitor to Italy.
Several years later I met my future wife, Tullia, in Rome, and began visiting Italy with even
greater frequency. As my research career at UAB approached its end, I had the
opportunity, thanks to Cristina Burani, to spend a year as a visiting researcher at the CNR
in Rome. I began telling people that I "commuted" between Birmingham, Alabama and
Rome. I read American newspapers flying East, and Italian newspapers flying West.
Before I knew it I had become Gold Medallion frequent flyer and was greeted by name by
the Delta flight attendants.
The periods I spent in Italy gradually grew longer. Tullia and I were married in the Spring
of 2005. At some point I stopped visiting Italy and began "visiting" the United States. One
morning in Rome I had an epiphany. As I travelled by bus to the CNR in Rome I looked at
all of the Asian and African immigrants around me. Then it struck me: the professor who
had spent a career studying immigrants to North America had himself become an
immigrant! An unintentional immigrant, to be sure, but a an immigrant nevertheless and
in every sense of the word.
Over the years I've written a lot about L2 acquisition. My research has led me and others
to question the belief that L2 learning is somehow doomed to failure if it occurs after the
end of "critical period." I'll admit to having had doubts about the so-called "critical period"
hypothesis at the beginning of my career, even before doing a lot of research. It always
seemed to me that most if not all adults who stuggle to learn an L2 lack the two crucial
advantages that every child learning an L1 possesses: a real opportunity to learn a
language through abundant direct contact with native speakers of the target language,
and a pressing need to learn it.
I retired from UAB in 2006 and became a resident of Tuscania in the same year. I now
had the OPPORTUNITY to learn Italian. I also had the other key ingredient--the NEED to
learn Italian--for few people in Tuscania speak English
Living in Tuscania also offered me the opportunity to experience first-hand something I
had studied academically for so many years. It gave me a chance to see what L2 learning
is like "on the inside". And I got to understand how it feels to struggle to make sense of
an unfamliar world around me, and to communicate, very awkwardly at first, in an L2.
photos: a wedding picture of me; Tullia: Giaki, our Jack Russell terrier; the arch near our home in
Tuscania; one of the thousands of Etruscan tombs around Tuscany; a portion of the medieval walls
surrounding Tuscania; the abandoned cloister of a local monastery; Jim, Tullia & Giaki
About Me
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