Júlia Florit-Pons holds a PhD in Language Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (2025). Her work focuses on multimodal language development, with her research examining children's multimodal abilities and their relation with language abilities and speech prominence. She has also recently worked on the development and testing of a multimodal intervention to promote oral narrative abilities in both classroom and speech therapy contexts.

During her fellowship at the University of Cologne (January–May 2026) Júlia plans to work with project A02 and A07 on the coordination of multimodal cues and the interplay between prosodic, manual and non-manual cues to prominence. The corpus used for this work involves dyadic conversations between autistic participants as compared to matched control dyads.

Contact: julia.florit(at)upf.edu

Huanhuan Yin holds a PhD in Psycholinguistics from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Her research investigates prediction in language comprehension and production, bilingualism, and interaction in both human–human and human–robot dialogue. She uses behavioural experiments, eye-tracking, EEG, and computational modelling.

During her fellowship at the University of Cologne (February–June 2026), she will work with Project C09 to examine how prosodic prominence shapes listeners’ pragmatic inference and predictive processing. Prosodic focus is central to comprehension because it marks information structure, which can in turn guide expectations about what might come next. This project will advance our understanding of how prominence supports prediction in spoken-language comprehension.

Contact: H.Yin-9(at)sms.ed.ac.uk

Bianca De Paolis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Linguistics at the Universities of Turin and Paris (CNRS, Paris 8), who just recently (2024) defended her PhD thesis. She is mainly working on prosody, information structure and L2 acquisition in Italian and French. 

For her stay in Cologne (May-July and September-October 2025), which will be hosted by project A07, Dr. De Paolis is planning to set up a corpus of native and non-native Italian and German, collecting both controlled and spontaneous data. This dataset will allow her to deepen a couple of research questions pursued during her PhD, whose investigation will also be of great interest for several projects in the CRC Prominence in Language. For example, there are potential synergies with projects C03 “Bilingual Narratives” (investigating prominence structures in bilingual speech, including Italian), C04 “Referential Activation” and C07 “Forward & Backward Functions” which examine aspects of reference and information structure. 

Contact: biancamaria.depaolis(at)unito.it

Marie Flesch is a Postdoctoral Fellow who was invited by project B10 and will stay in Cologne from April until the end of June 2025. She is the PI of the project EGICS ('Exploring Gender Inequalities in the digital world through Computational Sociolinguistics'), funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency).

During her stay, she intends to work on the creation of open-access resources and methods for the study of online corpora in English, French and German, making use of the resources of project B10 and the service project S ‘Data, Design and Sustainability’. Together with the B10 project team, she will also work on the orthographic normalization of noisy corpus data, and on the role of gender in hierarchies of prominence in social media corpora.

Contact: marie.flesch(at)u-paris.fr

David Felipe Guerrero-Beltrán holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Université Paris Cité and the University of Melbourne. He works on the documentation and description of Amazonian and Australian languages, focusing on the interactions between grammar, semantics and culture. He applies mixed methodologies, combining quantitative approaches from experimental and corpus linguistics and qualitative approaches from ethnographic and community-based research.

During his fellowship from April until September 2025, he works with project C02 on the analysis of temporal discourse structure and rhetorical relations in Burarra/Gun-nartpa, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from Northern Australia. He investigates the role of prominence in discourse structure. 

Contact: dfguerrerob(at)unal.edu.co

Eva joined the CRC1252 s as a junior fellow after finishing her PhD at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on the organisation of argument structure across languages, with a particular interest in how these structures are acquired and employed in language use.

During her fellowship, she joins the project B02. Her project involves annotating and analysing discourse prominence features in both child-directed speech and child speech in a naturalistic longitudinal corpus of Batangas Tagalog. She is interested in how discourse prominence affects the choice of voice and the production of referents in both the use and acquisition of this language.

Contact: eva.sheel-huber(at)uni-koeln.de

Naijing Liu was invited by project C09 and will stay in Cologne from the beginning of August until the end of September 2025.

Contact: Naijing.Liu@anu.edu.au

Prof. Dr. Khalil R. Iskarous from the University of Southern California, LA was invited by project A04 and is also planning on collaborating with project A07. He will stay in Cologne from May to July 2025. 

Contact: kiskarou(at)usc.edu

Prof. Dr. Edith Kaan from the University of Florida was invited by project C03 and is also planning on collaborating with project C07. She will stay in Cologne from the beginning of May until mid-June 2025. 

Contact: kaan(at)ufl.edu

Jeremy Steffman is an Assistant Professor in Phonetics at The University of Edinburgh and an affiliated researcher at the HIPCS in Seoul. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Jennifer Cole’s lab at Northwestern University after receiving his PhD in Linguistics from UCLA. 

Jeremy’s research deals with representations and processes in speech perception, prosody, intonation, and (primarily acoustic) phonetics. His research often examines how prosody influences spoken language processing. His recent works with Jennifer Cole and Khalil Iskarous (another CRC research fellow, 2025–2028) propose a novel model for analyses of pitch accents in American English, based on continuous primitives in dynamical systems.

feremy plans to collaborate with Project A01 in perception studies of (auditory) length and (prosodic) weight. He will also collaborate with A01 on a major exploratory research on the temporal alignment between speech and beat components in speech-accompanying gestures. Jeremy is also planning on collaborating with the projects A02, A06, A07, and C09. During 2025, Jeremy will stay in Cologne from mid-May until the end of June, on the last week of July, and from mid-November until mid-December.

Contact: jeremy.steffman(at)ed.ac.uk

Xiaoxia Sun is interested in the interface of language, music and cognitive sciences. She received her PhD. in linguistics from Northeast Normal University (China) in 2011 with a PhD thesis on "A study on the universality of subject relatives preference: ERP evidence from Chinese language“.  Subsequently, she broadened her research scope by visiting institutes of neuroscience and musicology in Europe, including the Department of Musicology in Cologne and the Cognition Auditive et Psychoacoustique (CAP) group at Lyon Neuroscience Research Center. Since 2015, she has been associate professor in linguistics at Nanjing Normal University. Her research concerns the evolution of language and shared resources of language and other domains (such as music or arithmetics). During her visit in Cologne in April and May 2025, she seeks to advance the research on prominence with an interdisciplinary, comparative language-music approach.

Contact: passionleben(at)gmail.com

Norielle Adricula is a researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. At her time as a Junior fellow within the CRC1252 she was completing her joint PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She is interested in language, the mechanisms of sentence production, and what it can tell us about the interaction between language and cognition. Her research combines corpus analyses with psycholinguistic methods to investigate adults' and children's underlying conceptual representations and processes during language production and acquisition. 

During her stay in Cologne from May to November 2023, worked as a guest researcher in project B05 where she examined the semantic and pragmatic prominence factors that influence voice in Tagalog.

Contact: norielle.adricula(at)colorado.edu

Jane Aristia is a post-doctoral researcher, currently working in the Psychology faculty at the University of Lisbon. Her work focusses on prediction and language processing. Her doctoral topic was the neurocognitive processing of morphological agreement.

‌In her time visiting Cologne, she participated with Project C09 in modelling how prominence influences the resolution of subject pronominal and zero anaphora in European Portuguese.

Jane Aristia worked as a guest researcher for Project C09 ("Prominence and predictive modelling") from September 2024 until December 2024.

Contact: j.aristia(at)gmail.com

Aya Awwad is a linguistics PhD researcher based at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on understanding speech production in the context of autism.

As part of her fellowship, she is replicating work conducted by Project A02 on global intonation style and prosodic marking of information structure by native German autistic speakers and extending it to native English speakers.

Aya Awwad worked as a guest researcher for project A02 ("Individual behaviour in encoding and decoding prosodic prominence") from June 2024 until September 2024.

Contact: A.Awwad@sms.ed.ac.uk

Florence Baills (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain) worked as a guest researcher in project A07 from April 2022 until December 2022 (with a break in August).

Her primary field of research is the acquisition of second language phonology in connection with gestures. During her fellowship in Cologne, Florence worked together with Stefan Baumann on an audiovisual corpus of video recordings of spontaneous speech by Catalan L2 learners of French as well as native French speakers. They investigated the role of head movements in L2 speech in prominence marking, both in relation to prosodic/rhythmic alignment and their semantic-pragmatic functions. Several conference papers and the submission of a journal paper resulted from this cooperation.

As a follow-up project, Florence Baills received a two-year (2023-2024) grant from UPF Barcelona for collaboration with UoC, which is again hosted (in the first year) by project A07 at IfL Phonetik. Furthermore, Florence is currently (summer term 2023) giving a block seminar at the IfL on “Multimodality: the functions of gesture-speech integration and how to study them”, and she also conducted a gesture annotation workshop which was open for all linguists at UoC.

Due to this wide variety of activities in Cologne, Florence got in touch with many members of the CRC and served as an advisor during the preparation of the third phase of the CRC (and as a potential cooperation partner if funding is extended).

Contact: fbaills(at)uni-koeln.de

Saverio Dalpedri is a PhD candidate at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he has been employed as a research assistant and contract lecturer. He has a background in both Indo-European studies and general linguistics, and has devoted his research on various aspects of the verbal system of ancient Indo-European languages (resultative participles, motion events, reduplication).

During his stay at the CRC as a guest researcher from July 2023 until December 2023, he investigated the dynamics of differential argument marking in Old Lithuanian and modern dialects within the project B08 “Non-canonical alignment and agreement patterns in East Baltic” under the supervision of Prof. Eugen Hill. He aims to a better understanding of the prominence effects in the realm of Lithuanian morphosyntax, with a focus on constructions built with non-agreeing participles which can license either nominative or accusative arguments.

Contact: saverio.dalpedri(at)uni-goettingen.de, s.dalpedri(at)gmail.com

Alessa Farinella (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project A03 from June 2022 until August 2022.

Contact: afarinella(at)umass.edu

Rafael completed his PhD with a dissertation entitled Numeral Constructions in Classical Nahuatl in 2023. He is interested in the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and combines insights from historical documents and fieldwork data from Spanish and Nahuatl.

He has been collaborating with project C04 ("Conceptual and referential activation in discourse") and has co-organized the workshop on Non-Bare Proper Names in May with the SFB1252. He stayed in Cologne as a guest researcher for project C04 ("Conceptual and referential activation in discourse") from April 2024 until the end of June 2024.

Contact: rafael.1731(at)gmail.com

Daniela Mereu was a guest researcher in project A02 ("Individual behaviour in encoding and decoding prosodic prominence"), while she was a research fellow at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

The research focused on the phonetic encoding of conversational structure in Italian, with a focus on temporal and functional properties of multi-unit backchannels. During her stay in Cologne from April to May 2022, she worked on project A02 together with Francesco Cangemi and Martine Grice, resulting in a publication in Journal of Pragmatics (Mereu, Cangemi & Grice 2024). The analysis was conducted on a corpus of Italian spontaneous speech (DIA-Dialogic ItAlian corpus), representative of the variety of Italian spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol). After the Fellowship, Daniela won a national competition for an assistant professor position at the University of Turin.

Contact: Daniela.Mereu(at)unibz.it

Onur Özsoy joined the SFB1252 as a Junior Fellow from July to December 2024 in the project "C03 - Reference Management in Bilingual Narratives”.

Onur's research at the CRC focuses on understanding how bilingual children, specifically German-Turkish speakers, integrate referential information in narratives. He conducted eye-tracking experiments to investigate the processing of referential expressions, such as pronouns and null forms, in Turkish as a heritage language. His work aims to shed light on the factors affecting prominence management in bilingual discourse, considering the role of literacy exposure, proficiency, and individual cognitive skills.

Onur’s expertise and research contributed to our understanding of prominence in bilingual discourse processing and foster valuable collaborations within the CRC.

Contact: oezsoy@leibniz-zas.de

Dr. Margreet Vogelzang (University of Cambridge, UK) worked as a guest researcher in project C03 from July 2022 until October 2022.

Contact: mv498(at)cam.ac.uk

Runyi Yao is a junior research fellow in the project C06 Prominence in subordinating rhetorical relations for the time period July-December 2024. She is working on her PhD thesis in psycholinguistics and experimental semantics with Matthew Husband and Daniel Altshuler at the University of Oxford.

She is interested in sentence and discourse processing, her PhD project is on the effects of causality expectations in discourse and their interaction with the discourse right frontier in self-paced reading. During her stay in Cologne, she worked on grounding right frontier effects in the Question-under-Discussion-based theory of discourse structure.

Contact: runyi.yao(at)ling-phil.ox.ac.uk

Peter Arkadiev is a typologist specializing in inflectional morphology, case and argument marking, and language contact, with a focus on Baltic, Slavic, and Northwest Caucasian languages. He has been involved in research projects at the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Zürich and the Department of English and Linguistics in Mainz. He also held a Marie Curie Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies.

Peter has conducted extensive fieldwork on Northwest Caucasian languages and is a member of the Academia Europaea. In Cologne, he continued his research on "Double-Marking of Objects and Prominence Hierarchies" in collaboration as a Fellow with Project B04, "Interaction of Nominal and Verbal Features for Differential Object Marking" from September until the end of November 2024.

Contact: alpgurev@gmail.com

Jesse Harris (UCLA, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project C05 from August 2022 until October 2022. He continues to collaborate with C05, especially on the topic of interaction between grammatical gender marking and perspective-taking. So far, this cooperation has led to several talks and presentations; joint publications are in the making.

The cooperation with Jesse has resulted in the following publication:

• Lialiou, Maria, Jesse Harris, Martine Grice & Petra B. Schumacher. 2024. Attention allocation to deviants with intonational rises and falls: Evidence from pupillometry. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of Cognitive Science Society, vol. 46. 

Contact: jharris(at)humnet.ucla.edu

Dr. Hae-Sung Jeon (University of Central Lancashire, UK) worked as a guest researcher in project A02 from July to September 2023.

Hae-Sung's research concerns speech prosody and phonetic variation. She mainly uses behavioural experimentation, acoustic analysis and statistical modelling as research methods. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the relationship between prosodic properties in speech and linguistic structure and how listeners hear and interpret the speech signal. She has investigated these questions in various dialects and languages, using data from language users with heterogeneous demographic and linguistic profiles. She collaborates with speech researchers at Cologne to examine the relationship between the distribution of information load, morphosyntax and prosody in communicative situations and also intonational variation in Korean dialects.

The cooperation with Hae-Sung has resulted in the following publication:

• Jeon, Hae-Sung, Constantijn Kaland & Martine Grice. 2024. Cluster Analysis of Korean IP-Final Intonation. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024. Leiden.

Contact: hjeon1(at)uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) worked as a guest researcher in project C07 during June and July 2023.

Andrew Kehler obtained his PhD in computer science from Harvard University. After working as senior computer scientist in the industry for five years, he became professor of linguistics at UC San Diego in 2000, where his main area of interest is discourse interpretation with a focus on coherence relations, inferences and pronoun interpretation. He currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation and on a number of editorial boards, including the Journal of Semantics and Semantics and Pragmatics. His interdisciplinary research combines theoretical linguistic, psycholinguistic and computational linguistic models of discourse comprehension.

Contact: akehler(at)ucsd.edu

Chigusa Kurumada is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester (USA), working on the cognitive processing and comprehension of language, in particular in relation to speech prosody and its pragmatic meaning.

Linking her research interests with those of the CRC, and in particular with the host project A07, Dr. Kurumada worked on the development of experiments on the adaptive perception of prosodic prominence and the influence of multiple meaning-related cues (in German and/or English), applying - and further developing - a computational model that can account for cross-talker variability. She stayed in Cologne as a Senior Fellow for three months (September-November 2024).

Contact: ckuruma2(at)ur.rochester.edu

Prof. Duygu Özge (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey) worked as a guest researcher in projects B04, C03, C04 and C05 from June until July 2022 and from September until October 2022.

Duygu Özge has a wide variety of research interests including examining how children learn, represent, and understand language, and how cognitive or social status (e.g., having an impairment or having a social disadvantage) might impact language processing and other cognitive abilities.

Contact: duyguozge(at)gmail.com; duyguo(at)metu.edu.tr

Dr. Péter Rácz (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) worked as a guest researcher in project B02 from June until August 2023.

Péter works on language learning. He is interested in the mental representation of word formation patterns and how these are shaped by cognitive constraints on learnability, memory integration, and the social dynamics of the language community. He works with experimental and corpus data and uses algorithmic learning models and quantitative methods.

Contact: racz.peter.marton(at)ttk.bme.hu

Roohollah Mofidi is a senior fellow in the CRC 1252 Prominence in Language from September to November, 2024, in project B04. He is currently employed as an Assistant Professor in Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin, Iran.

With B04, he cooperates on his research on “Variation in the placement of agreement clitics in Nayini: A prominence-oriented account”. Following his PhD thesis in 2011, “Event structure and its determinants in Persian”, he has primarily focused on the diachronic development of aspect and mood markers in Persian from the 3rd century onwards, in a typological framework and with a usage-based approach. He has also been working on a diachronic corpus of New Persian (10th-20th c.). He has experience gathering fieldwork data for Nayini (in 2022 and 2024), and supervising fieldwork on other Iranian languages.

In Cologne, he undertook a detailed analysis of his data with respect to the prominence principles determining the head marking in this language.

Contact: roo.mofidi(at)gmail.com

Michelina (Elina) Savino is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication at the University of Bari, Italy. Her research interests are centered around prosody, both in terms of theory and in how prosody is used in discourse, especially how speakers structure their utterances and whether intonation contours, when strategically placed, aid recall. She also works on prosody in conversation, including phenomena such as turn-taking, back-channelling and accommodation/entrainment to the interlocutor. Her survey of question contours across the different varieties of Italian is an important work of reference.

She spent a total of six months at the CRC 1252 in 2021 and 2022, continuing her research together with members of projects A01 and C09.

Elina Savino has also worked together with Mercator Fellow Bodo Winter and Martine Grice on the effect of intonation on working memory, culminating in a publication in Psychonomic Bulletin Review (2020), entitled “Intonation does aid serial recall after all” in which – contrary to previous claims in the literature –  intonation has been shown to play a role in recall over and above that achieved by pauses. Currently she is working with members of A01 and C09 on a further study on the effect of intonation on serial recall, especially rising intonation. A further cooperation investigates the perceptual magnet effect from the native variety on the imitation of regional intonation contours.

The publications resulting from the collaboration with Michelina Savino so far include:

• Grice, Martine, Michelina Savino, Petra B. Schumacher, Christine T. Röhr & T. Mark Ellison. To appear. Rises on Pitch Accents and Edge Tones Affect Serial Recall Performance at Item and Domain levels. Laboratory Phonology. pdf
• Savino, Michelina, Simon Wehrle & Martine Grice. 2024. The prosody of Italian newsreading: a diachronic analysis. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024. Leiden.
• Sbranna, Simona, Michelina Savino, Florence Baills & Martine Grice. 2024. Vocal feedback and eye gaze patterns in Italian task-based dyadic conversations. In Proceedings AISV Annual Conference. Turin.
• Savino, Michelina, Francisco Torreira & Martine Grice. 2023. Prosodic convergence across varieties of Italian. In Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1310–1314. Prague, Czech Republic: Guarant International.
• Röhr, Christine T., Michelina Savino & Martine Grice. 2022. The effect of intonational rises on serial recall in German. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022, 759–763. Lisbon, Portugal.
• Savino, Michelina, Simona Sbranna, Caterina Ventura, Aviad Albert & Martine Grice. 2022. Imitating intonation in a non-native variety: the influence of the native repertoire. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022, 739–743. Lisbon, Portugal.
• Savino, Michelina, Bodo Winter, Andrea Bosco & Martine Grice. 2020. Intonation does aid serial recall after all. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 1–7.
• Ventura, Caterina, Martine Grice, Michelina Savino, Diana Kolev, Ingmar Brilmayer & Petra B. Schumacher. 2020. Attention allocation in a language with post-focal prominences. NeuroReport 31(8). 624–628.

Contact: michelina.savino(at)uniba.it oder msavino1(at)uni-koeln.de 

Valentina Schiattarella is a postdoctoral researcher (University of Naples, L’Orientale, Italy) interested primarily in the description and documentation of minority languages, particularly those belonging to the Berber/Amazigh family (Afroasiatic). She was invited as an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher at the Department of Afrikanistik und Äthiopistik of the University of Hamburg and worked there from 2021 to 2023. 

During her time in Cologne as Senior Fellow in project A03 she aimed to analyse the interaction between the acoustic cues of stress and the prosodic features that languages use to mark other types of prominence (such as those marking the beginning or end of the intonation unit; focus; topic, etc...).

She also sought to investigate whether the speaker and listener's perception of stress placement aligns with these acoustic cues. This preliminary analysis focused on selected languages (mainly Berber) spoken in North-Western Africa, using freely available oral material from open archives. 

Valentina Schiattarella worked as a guest researcher for project A03 "Prosodic prominence in cross-linguistic perspective" from October 2024 until December 2024.

Contact: vale.schiattarella@gmail.com

Prof. Dr. Irina Sekerina (CUNY, USA) worked as a guest researcher in project C07 from October 2022 until November 2022.

Irina Sekerina’s research focuses on sentence processing, language acquisition and more recently on heritage languages. During her stay in Cologne, she worked extensively with project C07 on referential preferences of personal and demonstrative pronouns in Russian, looking at monolingual adults, children, as well as bilingual and heritage speakers. This research aims at looking at the functional contributions of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic perspective and to further investigate the role of the antecedent’s prominence-lending cues.

Contact: Irina.Sekerina(at)csi.cuny.edu

Dr. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali is Assistant Professor of General Linguistics at Shahrekord University, Iran, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the University of Bamberg, and the University of Hamburg. His (2015) dissertation, entitled Prosody Modelling in Persian Text-to-Speech (TTS) Systems, was awarded a prize at the Festival for Top Dissertations: Production and Entrepreneurship in Humanities. Currently, his main areas of research and publication are Persian prosody, language documentation, Iran’s languages, and linguistic atlas. 

During his stay in Cologne from October 2022 through May 2023, he worked as a senior research fellow in project A04. Through this project, they recorded a group of Persian speakers to investigate prosodic prominence in Persian. In addition to this acoustic and kinematic study, a complementary perception test was conducted to assess the listeners’ perception of prosodic prominence in this language. And to capture variability in the production data, they also extended their kinematic and acoustic analysis by applying functional data analysis (FDA) to the different types of speech curves related to intonation and articulation of the prominent utterances in the recorded Persian corpus.

In addition to the prosodic studies, he is co-editor of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI). He is currently researching language distribution in the Lorestan Province of Iran. Furthermore, he has already carried out field research in Iran, specifically in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari, Hormozgan, Ilam, Zanjan, Semnan, Kermanshah, Hamadan, Gilan, and Lorestan Provinces.

The cooperation with Dr. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali has resulted in the following publication:

• Roessig, Simon, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Lena Pagel & Doris Mücke. 2024. Prosodic realization of different focus types in Persian. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2-5 July, 2024. Leiden, the Netherlands.
• Taheri-Ardali, Mortaza, Simon Roessig, Lena Pagel & Doris Mücke. 2025. Prosodic cues for broad, narrow, and corrective focus in Persian. Language and Speech.

Contact: taheriling(at)gmail.com / taheri(at)sku.ac.ir

Prof. Dr. Alexandra (Sandra) Vella worked as a guest researcher in project A01 from April 2023 to June 2023.

Alexandra Vella is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Insitute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta. Her research focuses on Phonetics and Phonology, particularly aspects of prosody such as stress, prosodic structure and intonation, including as manifestations of prominence more generally, in Maltese and its dialects, and in Maltese English, the variety of English of speakers of Maltese. With the aim of facilitating research leading to the development of speech technologies for Maltese, she is leading the project Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem.

Her research on the prosodic structure of Maltese and Maltese English has led to a number of important insights relating to the intonational possibilities which are available for exploitation by the languages of the world. She has collaborated with Martine Grice and Anna Bruggeman in the area of intonational phonology (“Stress, pitch accent, and beyond: Intonation in Maltese questions” Journal of Phonetics) which examined wh-question intonation in Maltese and has provided evidence for tones characterised by pitch prominence but not associated with lexically stressed syllables. A further paper on Maltese and Maltese English intonation in general is under review. Together with Maria Lialiou, Aviad Albert and Martine Grice, the Maltese wh-question data has been revisited using periodic energy analysis (using the ProPer toolbox).

She spent two months in Cologne as a CRC Fellow and continues to work with members of the A01 project, who were recently hosted by the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta in order to run an experiment on the phenomenon of “stress deafness” in Maltese bilingual speakers: a paper presenting the results of this experiment will be presented at ICPhS 2023 which will be held in Prague.

The publications resulting from the collaboration with Alexandra Vella so far include:

• Lialiou, Maria, Anna Bruggeman, Alexandra Vella, Sarah Grech, Petra Schumacher & Martine Grice. 2023. Word-level prominence and “stress deafness” in Maltese-English bilinguals. In Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 132–136. Prague, Czech Republic: Guarant International.
• Lialiou, Maria, Aviad Albert, Alexandra Vella & Martine Grice. 2021. Periodic energy mass on head and edge tones in Maltese wh-constructions. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 161–165. Sonderborg, Denmark.
• Vella, Alexandra & Martine Grice. To appear. Association of tones in Maltese. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic Typology III. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contact: alexandra.vella@um.edu.mt

Dr. Kofi Yakpo (University of Hong Kong) worked as a guest researcher in project A03 during April 2023.

Kofi Yakpo is Associate Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. His research addresses linguistic and social forces in the evolution of languages spoken in multilingual societies, in particular those of Africa and the Global African Diaspora. He has published extensively, spanning linguistics, politics, music, and creative writing.
His books include:
A Grammar of Pichi (2019),
Boundaries and Bridges: Language Contact in Multilingual Ecologies (2017, with Pieter Muysken),
Code-switching Between Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (2015, with Gerald Stell).

During his time in Cologne, Kofi Yakpo looked at the role of prominence in prosodic contact between tone and stress systems, with a particular focus on the Afro-European Creole languages of the Atlantic Basin, and gave a talk titled "Tone meets stress in the Afro-Atlantic: social context, typology, outcomes".

Contact: kofi(at)hku.hk

Betül Erbaşı (University of Southern California) was a guest researcher in project B04 from May through July 2019. As a PhD student, Betül collaborated with project B04 on topics around Turkish DOM and nominal semantics. 

Contact: betul.erbasi(at)gmail.com, semra.kizilkaya(at)uni-koeln.de

Zarina Levy-Forsythe (Ben Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel) was a guest researcher in project B04 during April and May 2019. As a PhD student, Zarina investigated Uzbek direct objects at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. She collaborated with project B04 on topics such as DOM in Uzbek, as well as partitivity in Turkic languages.

Contact: zarinale@post.bgu.ac.il

Valeria Lucarini (Scuola di Specializzazione in Psichiatria, Università degli Studi di Parma, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze) was a guest researcher in project A02.

During her stay, she worked on the research project A02 together with Francesco Cangemi, Juliane Zimmermann, Kai Vogeley and Martine Grice. This study was conducted not only on healthy persons, but also on persons with autism and persons with schizophrenia, whose social cognition is impaired and who thus exemplify disorders affecting information processing related to communication and interaction with others. This investigation into the perception of the interplay of communicatively conveyed visual nonverbal and auditory paraverbal information in persons with schizophrenia is also the topic of a thesis Valeria Lucarini wrote in the course of her specialisation in psychiatry in Italy.

In collaboration with members of A02, she published an overview article in which prosody is treated as a bridge between psychopathology and linguistics (Frontiers in Psychiatry) and has used conversational metrics to analyse speech in patients with schizophrenia (European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Language Resources and Evaluation, and European Psychiatry).

• Cangemi, Francesco, Martine Grice, Alicia Janz, Valeria Lucarini, Malin Spaniol & Kai Vogeley. 2023. Content-free speech activity records: interviews with people with schizophrenia. Lang Resources & Evaluation. | A02
• Dusi, L., Valeria Lucarini, Francesco Cangemi, Jacopo Lucchese, Francesca Giustozzi, Francesca Magnani, Carlo Marchesi, Kai Vogeley, Martine Grice & Matteo Tonna. 2022. Language and turn-taking in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. European Psychiatry 65(1). 763–764. | A02​​​​​​​
• Lucarini, Valeria, Francesco Cangemi, Benyamin Daniel, Jacopo Lucchese, Francesca Paraboschi, Chiara Cattani, Carlo Marchesi, Martine Grice, Kai Vogeley & Matteo Tonna. 2021. Conversational metrics, psychopathological dimensions and self-disturbances in patients with schizophrenia. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. | A02
• Lucarini, Valeria, Martine Grice, Francesco Cangemi, Juliane T. Zimmermann, Carlo Marchesi, Kai Vogeley & Matteo Tonna. 2020. Speech prosody as a bridge between psychopathology and linguistics: The case of the schizophrenia spectrum. Frontiers in Psychiatry, Section Social Cognition 11:531863. pdf | A02

Dària Serés stayed at the CRC as a guest researcher from April through June 2018. During her stay, she worked on her dissertation topic "The expression of genericity and (in)definiteness in languages with and without articles" under the direction of Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger. Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Maria Teresa Espinal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Dr. Olga Borik (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia).

While in Cologne, she developed the sections of her dissertation dealing with information structure and the interpretation of bare nominals in pre- and postverbal position in Russian, centering on the interplay of genericity and recency. Dària Serés also studied genericity at the sentence level and investigated how tense, mood and aspect influence the interpretation of generic sentences in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages. To this end, she continued studying definition sentences, as these constitute an instance of genericity at the sentence and NP level. Furthermore, she worked on the characterization of statements expressing generalizations and regularities.

Contact: daria.seres(at)uab.cat

Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson was a guest researcher from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. He stayed at our CRC from 1 ‒ 28 February 2019 and supported project C06.

Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson works on word order variation in subordinate clauses in (the history of) Icelandic. Subordinate clauses are a major linguistic pattern of expression for subordinating rhetorical relations. The project C06 benefited greatly from Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson’s expertise in subordinate clause syntax and his feedback on their studies on the role of syntax in the expression of discourse-structural subordination and the prominence asymmetries between main and subordinate clauses. The main aim of the collaboration was to compare the findings and develop a unified account.

Contact: hfv3(at)hi.is

Yuto Yamazaki, doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, was a guest researcher at the CRC 1252 from 27 January to 17 February 2020. He cooperated with project C04.

In his dissertation project, Yuto Yamazaki investigated the semantic relationship between the discourse structure and word order of cleft sentences in German. His research focused on the differences between canonical DO-Clefts (Es ist Hans, der kommt) and inverted DO-Clefts (Hans ist es, der kommt), which have different word order variants that are accompanied by two distinct interpretations. These constructions are also of particular interest for the SFB, since a number of projects are working on the discourse prominence of DO-Clefts.

Contact: clynelish14(at)gmail.com

Jennifer E. Arnold works in language psychology, studying the question of how we communicate with apparent and surprising ease. Her main goal is tracing the concrete mental steps that form the basis of speakers' capability to use and understand language. Her principal interest is thus in uncovering how speakers structure larger units of speech at both the production and interpretation ends. Jennifer E. Arnold has conducted various studies on referent management in general and pronoun resolution in particular and is considered one of the most influential researchers in these areas. She is also well-regarded as a cognition scholar due to her research into language usage, including its interplay with attention, motivation and alphabetization.

Jennifer E. Arnold's work interfaces with that of the CRC at multiple points. Her expertise in referent management - in both speech production and speech interpretation - is invaluable for the research conducted in area C, especially projects C04, C06 and C07. Her work on referent management from a language acquisition perspective is also of interest for project C03. Furthermore, as Jennifer E. Arnold has also studied the role of prosody in pronoun resolution, she was also able to contribute her findings to the work of area A, especially A01.

Contact: jarnold(at)email.unc.edu

Aroldo de Andrade is a researcher at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and does research on information structure, syntax and non-canonical constructions. He was a guest at the CRC from 22 November to 23 December 2019 and collaborated with projects C02, C04, C05 and C06. 

Contact: aroldo.andrade(at)gmail.com

T. Mark Ellison is a researcher from Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian's capital. He is a computational modeller. Synthesising a rich background in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science and psychology, his research focuses on building principled accounts of linguistic processing and behaviour.  Recent research collaborations have developed models in fields as varied as experimental semiotics, language evolution, language diversity, bilingual cognition, and metaphor expression. 

T. Mark Ellison is currently based within the CRC Prominence in Language. As part of this work, he has been developing collaborations: interpreting the relationship between neural signals of surprise and prominence in expressions (in collaboration with project A01), creating a new algorithm for measuring periodic energy as one factor in phonetic prominence (A02), understanding the different roles of language frames (B05), and exploring the interaction of coindexing preferences with discourse prominence in German pronouns (C07).

Contact: tellison(at)uni-koeln.de

Manuel Leonetti was Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and one of the most renowned linguists in the Spanish-speaking world. His research focused on syntax, semantics and pragmatics, especially in the interface areas of these three fields. He published many relevant papers on nominal prominence properties such as definiteness and specificity, on focus and information structure, as well as on different prominence-dependent constructions such as zero subjects and differential object marking.

Manuel Leonetti's research is of key relevance for several projects of the CRC, especially in Area B. He mainly cooperated with B04, where he also supervised (using the Cotutela method) the dissertation of Diego Romero Heredero. Due to his outstanding expertise in the fields of (temporal) anaphors, null subjects and coherence relations, he also made highly relevant contributions to projects in Research Area C, including C02, C03 and C06, with all of which he had an intensive exchange of ideas during the workshop "Ways of Reference in Romance Languages" (Cologne, 27-28.09.2018).

We regret Manuel Leonetti's passing and are grateful to have known him.

Michelina (Elina) Savino is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication at the University of Bari, Italy. Her research interests are centred around prosody, both in terms of theory and in how prosody is used in discourse, especially how speakers structure their utterances and whether intonation contours, when strategically placed, aid recall. She also works on prosody in conversation, including phenomena such as turn-taking, back-channelling and accommodation/entrainment to the interlocutor. Her survey of question contours across the different varieties of Italian is an important work of reference.

She has spent a total of five months in Cologne during phase I of the CRC and has hosted members of project A01 in Bari, where experiments were run using a portable EEG system. This was the first time that EEG experiments have investigated the intonation of a Southern variety of Italian on site. The results are to appear in Neuroreport “Attention allocation in a language with post-focal prominences”. She has also collaborated on the perception of post-focal prominence in Italian L1 and German L2 listeners, a study that is currently under review.
Elina Savino has also worked together with Mercator Fellow Bodo Winter and Martine Grice on the effect of intonation on working memory, culminating in a publication in Psychonomic Bulletin Review (2020), entitled “Intonation does aid serial recall after all” in which – contrary to previous claims in the literature –  intonation has been shown to play a role in recall over and above that achieved by pauses. In June 2019 she co-organised a workshop with members of A01 and A02 in Bari on Prominence between Cognitive Functions and Linguistic Structures (CoFLiS).

Contact: michelina.savino(at)uniba.it or msavino1(at)uni-koeln.de.

Marc Swerts is a professor at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences in the Department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. His research focuses on non-verbal communication and the expansion of spoken dialogue systems. He is a cooperation partner of the project A03.

Contact: M.G.J.Swerts(at)tilburguniversity.edu