vroman@hawaii.edu

NEWPicture of RB-V picking coconuts in Waikiki at age 12.


[For Vrooman genealogy buffs who found this page: I was born Robert Walker Vroman, August 23, 1945, in Monterey, California. The "Bley" is my wife's family name. I am the son of Wilbur Norton Vroman of LaSalle, Illinois and Laura Elizabeth Walker of Adrian, Michigan. In the system of Wickersham and Comstock, my position in the Vrooman family tree in America is 1.1.6.6.9.3.1.6.8.7.1, eleventh generation from Hendrick Meese Vrooman (d. 1690, "kild and burnt in the massacre").]
ROBERT BLEY-VROMAN is Dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature of the University of Hawai'i. He received his MA in Germanics and his MA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington. At Hawai'i, he has served as Chair of the Department of Second Language Studies, Director of the Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. and was the first Director of the National Foreign Language Resource Center .

Before joining the faculty of the University of Hawai'i, he taught in Romania at Universitatea din Cluj (English and applied linguistics), the University of Texas at Austin (linguistics) and at the University of Michigan, where he was Director of Courses for the English Language Institute. He also served as Project Manager at the interstate consortium SEARCH Group (Sacramento) for the national project on criminal justice terminology (Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration).

His research is concentrated in applied linguistics, syntax, and second language acquisition theory. His recent theoretical work attempts to integrate current trends in linguistic theory with accounts of child/adult differences in language acquisition. His research has appeared in the journals Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, Linguistic Analysis, Linguistic Inquiry, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and in edited collections. His most influential papers are "The logical problem of foreign language learning" and "The comparative fallacy in interlanguage studies".

He is also interested in computational linguistics, natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and machine translation and worked on the German-English machine translation project of Siemens AG (Project METAL), where he was responsible for the grammar used by the German parser and for aspects of the design of the programming environment.

He is contradance caller for the Contradancers of Hawaii, pianist with the band Whiskey Starship, hiker, collector of old telephones. , and ringer of bells in the St. Andrew's cathedral tower.


Selected Work Available On-line

Acquisition of the constraints on wanna contraction by advanced second language learners: Universal Grammar and imperfect knowledge. July 2002. With Soo-Ok Kweon.
In Acrobat pdf format
Features and Patterns in Foreign Language Learning
Plenary Address Second Language Research Forum Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan
October 17-19, 1997

The text of the SLRF plenary, as read:

In rtf format, 50K interchange file; readable by MS Word and most other word processors
In Acrobat pdf format
In ascii text format
The handout from the SLRF plenary (.pdf, 22K; missing some drawn-in lines and boxes. Check back later for fixed version of handout.)
Conservative Pattern Accumulation in Foreign Language Learning
Talk at EUROSLA 6, Nijmegen, May 31-June 2, 1996
The handout from the Eurosla talk (.pdf, 22K)
(This handout subsumes much of the Hawaii talk handout, below; if you have this, you don't need the Hawaii handout.)
The text of the Eurosla talk, unrevised, as read (.txt, 18K)

Patterns, Constructions, Peripheral Grammar, and Second Language Acquisition Theory
Talk at the University of Hawai'i of January 30, 1996
The handout from the talk. (The EUROSLA talk above is more complete.)
Reaction Time as a supplement to grammaticality judgements in the investigation of second language learners' competence. (1989) with Deborah Masterson. University of Hawai'i Working Papers in ESL, 8(2), 207-237.
In Acrobat pdf format
Outline of the use of "plain speech" ("thee" and "thou") among Quakers
The Plain Speech FAQ (in plain ascii text, of course)

Sentence matching information

Source code and sample items for sentence-matching reaction-time experiments, as described in

Bley-Vroman, R., & Masterson, D. (1989). Reaction Time as a supplement to grammaticality judgements in the investigation of second language learners' competence. University of Hawai'i Working Papers in ESL, 8(2), 207-237.

This paper is available on-line from the UHWPESL website.

Pascal Source Code

Don't try to display these using a Web browser. Download them to disk. They are DOS-format ascii files.

Draft PsyScope script

You need the script and the five short files of stimulus sentences.

Don't try to display these using a Web browser. Download them to disk. They are Mac text-only files.

PsyScope is an interactive graphic system for experimental design and control on the Macintosh. It was developed at the Department of Psychology of Carnegie Mellon University.


SLS Department Homepage

Revised 22 March 2013