Norielle Adricula is a researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is 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, she will be working as a guest researcher in project B05 where she will examine the semantic and pragmatic prominence factors that influence voice in Tagalog.

Contact:

E-Mail: norielle.adricula(at)colorado.edu

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 will serve as an advisor during the preparation of the third phase of the CRC (and as a potential cooperation partner if funding is extended).

Contact: 

E-Mail: 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 will investigate 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

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

Contact:

E-Mail: afarinella(at)umass.edu

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.

During her stay in Cologne from April to May 2022, she worked on project A02 together with Francesco Cangemi and Martine Grice. The research focused on the phonetic encoding of conversational structure in Italian, with a focus on temporal and functional properties of multi-unit backchannels. 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. At the moment, the collaboration is continuing to complete the analysis and publish the results.

Contact:

E-Mail: Daniela.Mereu(at)unibz.it

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

Contact:

E-Mail: mv498(at)cam.ac.uk

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

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.

Contact:

E-Mail: jharris(at)humnet.ucla.edu

Dr. Hae-Sung Jeon (University of Central Lancashire, UK) will be working 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.

Contact:

hjeon1(at)uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Andrew Kehler (UC San Diego) will be working 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

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:

E-Mail: duyguozge(at)gmail.com; duyguo(at)metu.edu.tr

Dr. Péter Rácz (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) will be working 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

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.

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

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:

E-Mail: 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.

Contact:

E-Mail: taheriling(at)gmail.com / taheri(at)sku.ac.ir

Prof. Dr. Alexandra (Sandra) Vella will be working 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 will be spending 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.

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

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