When Janet van Hell first came to the U.S., she found herself often repeating her go-to double espresso order at Starbucks. Even today, after many years living in this country, she sometimes has to ask her daughters, who grew up in State College, to repeat her requests to Siri or Alexa: The virtual assistants, she says, can understand them better “because they don’t have a noticeable accent.”

Van Hell—director of Penn State’s Center for Language Science—is from the Netherlands. A psycholinguistics scholar with a focus on bilingual language processing, she cites those experiences as piquing her interest in studying how the brain processes dialects, foreign accents, and different types of non-native speech.

Most people are inclined to believe that understanding a foreign accent is difficult. But Van Hell’s research has shown that it actually takes the human brain just a few minutes to adapt to and process sounds that are different from what it has been trained to listen to. She’s interested in extending her research to making technology more linguistically aware: “It’s supposed to make our lives easier,” she says, “but Siri and Alexa have been trained on standard American English—which actually doesn’t even exist because English is spoken in completely different ways across the U.S. As a result, the moment these voice recognition systems are processing speech that is slightly different—it can be African American English, Southern English, Dutch-accented English, even a person who stutters—they are no longer able to help out.”

Van Hell’s research has brought together students from information sciences and technology, computer science engineering, linguistics, psychology, German, Spanish, and communication sciences and disorders, in the hopes that a multidisciplinary approach can best address an age-old and difficult societal issue that she believes has parlayed itself into the technological sphere. “We’re looking at the many different ways in which human technology should be made more linguistically and culturally diverse,” she says, “including for systems that are used in educational settings, which are also mostly trained on interactions that are quite far off from the interactions children from different cultures are actually exposed to.”

Van Hell started her career in the Netherlands studying how Dutch children learn foreign languages, working out of a custom-made VW bus fitted with an electroencephalogram. In State College, she also has a fully equipped “brain bus” from which to study children learning Spanish—and teach them about how the brain works.