Mark Dingemanse ist Associate Professor für Sprache und Kommunikation am Zentrum für Sprachwissenschaften der Radboud-Universität in Nimwegen. Seine Arbeit zu Ideophonen hat die multimodale Natur beschreibender Mittel  im  alltäglichen  Sprachgebrauch  aufgezeigt,  und  seine  teamorientierte  Arbeit  zu  sozialer  Interaktion  hat  mehrere pragmatische Universalien der Konversationsstruktur aufgedeckt. 

Von 2018 bis 2023 leitete er das Projekt „Elementary Particles of Conversation”, das durch einen Vidi-Zuschuss des niederländischen Forschungsrats (NWO) finanziert wurde. Im Jahr 2020 wurde er mit dem Young Scientists Award  in Humanities der  Königlichen  Niederländischen  Akademie  der  Künste und  Wissenschaften (KNAW) ausgezeichnet; die Jury lobte  die  Unkonventionalität  seiner  Arbeit  und  sein  Engagement  für  offene  Wissenschaft  und  Öffentlichkeitsarbeit. Im Mittelpunkt seiner aktuellen Forschung steht die Sprache als wichtigste und flexibelste Technologie der Menschheit, was ihn dazu veranlasst hat, neue Perspektiven auf handwerkliche und künstliche Formen der Sprachverwendung zu entwickeln. 

Diese Arbeit findet im Rahmen des Forschungsprogramms „Futures of Language” statt, das durch ein Vici-Talentstipendium des niederländischen Forschungsrats finanziert wird. Seine Expertise in der Erforschung von Gesprächsstrukturen und sein Interesse an Sprachtypologie werden für das SFB von großem Wert sein.

Marianne Gullberg ist Professorin für Psycho-/Allgemeine Linguistik an der Universität Lund, Schweden, Direktorin des Lund University Humanities Lab, einer autonomen Abteilung für Infrastruktur, und Direktorin von Huminfra, einer schwedischen nationalen Infrastruktur für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. 

Ihre Forschung konzentriert sich auf den Erwerb und den Echtzeit-Sprachgebrauch bei erwachsenen L2-Nutzern und zwei- bis mehrsprachigen Sprechern, wobei sie sich auf Semantik, Diskurs sowie die Produktion und das Verständnis von Gesten konzentriert. Sie leitete die Gruppe „The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing” am Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik (2000-2009 mit P. Indefrey) und war 2003 Mitbegründerin des Nijmegen Gesture Centre (mit A. Özyürek). Derzeit ist sie Stipendiatin des Wallenberg-Stipendiums für zehn Jahre, leitet das Forschungsprogramm „Transdicisplinary Approaches to Learning, Acquisition, Multilingualism” (TEAM), das vom Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 2024–2029 finanziert wird, und leitet die Plattform „Language Acquisition, Multilingualism and Teaching” (LAMiNATE) an der Universität Lund. 

Sie war Herausgeberin mehrerer Fachzeitschriften, war von 2003 bis 2007 Vizepräsidentin der European Second Language Association und erhielt 2019 deren Distinguished Scholar Award. Derzeit ist sie Präsidentin der International Society for Gesture Studies. Ihre tiefgreifenden Einblicke in die Gestikforschung, Mehrsprachigkeit und das Lernen werden die Forschung im SFB bereichern.

Jason Bishop is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York, where he also functions as director of the CUNY prosody laboratory. He is currently one of the most influential researchers on prosodic prominence and the factors influencing its production and perception, documented in many influential papers published in prestigious journals.

Speech prosody is at the center of Jason’s scientific interests but his work covers a wide range of topics and methods. For example, he worked on the role of expectations in the perception of prosody and prosodic disambiguation, on Focus Projection and the meaning of prenuclear accents, on implicit (and explicit) prosody in relative clause attachment, and on individual differences in the production and perception of prosody.

The many interfaces of Jason’s work on prosody with the fields of neuro-psychology, socio-linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, syntax as well as typology make him an ideal contact person for many researchers in the CRC across all areas.

Contact: jbishop(at)gc.cuny.edu

Website

Contact: P.Hendriks(at)rug.nl

Eva Schultze-Berndt is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester (UK). She is a renowned expert in linguistic typology, with an areal specialisation in Australian languages. An important focus of her research is on differential argument marking (DAM), where she investigates factors influencing DAM in spoken language corpora from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special attention to the role of verb semantics, argument structure, information structure and prosody. Cooperation with Eva Schultze-Berndt will therefore be of great benefit to Area B, where DAM continues to be a central topic. But her expertise spans a number of areas of relevance to the CRC, thus making her a valuable asset to the entire CRC: her expertise in prosody and information structure will further strengthen the ties of Area B to Areas A and C; her strong empirical grounding in discourse and ecologically valid data types will support the CRC’s overall focus on discourse; and her cross-linguistic expertise is set to contribute to the CRC’s research on universality and variability. 

Contact: Eva.Schultze-Berndt(at)manchester.ac.uk

Bodo Winter is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and a recipient of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University Press journal Language & Cognition, a member of the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI, and co-founder of the annual Birmingham Statistics for Linguists Summer School. His research focuses on numerical communication, multimodality, gesture, and iconicity. He collaborates with a number of projects within the CRC and provides extensive training in statistics and data analysis in a number of workshops for students, postdocs and PIs.

Website

Kontakt: b.winter(at)bham.ac.uk

Jennifer Cole is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (USA). She is one of the leading researchers in the field of speech prosody and laboratory phonology, and is recognised worldwide, not only as a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology and, until 2015, General Editor of its journal but also by publishing many influential papers in prestigious journals in the fields of Phonetics and Phonology. Her main interests lie in experimental and theoretical research that investigates the physiological and cognitive bases of phonological systems. As the director of the Linguistic Laboratory for Speech Prosody in Urbana-Champaign she supervised several projects that investigated the production and perception of prosody in English and other languages. A major focus of this work is on prosody in spontaneous, conversational speech and methods for prosody annotation, such as the Rapid Prosody Transcription method for untrained listeners, which is used for quantifying prosodic prominence.

Cooperation with Jennifer Cole was of great benefit not only to Area A, which is concerned with prosodic prominence and its modelling and quantification, but also to the whole CRC, especially since she has worked intensively on the relation of prosodic prominence to meaning and discourse structure, and on the role of syntactic structure in guiding prosody perception.

Contact: jennifer.cole1(at)northwestern.edu

Andrew Kehler is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Califonia, San Diego (USA) where he heads the Computational Linguistics Lab. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of computational psycholinguistics of discourse and has had a major impact on the advancement of Bayesian modelling of pronoun resolution.

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. Andrew Kehler's research profile made him an ideal Mercator Fellow within the CRC. The computational model of pronoun resolution that he developed contributed greatly to research in Area C, which is concerned with the modelling of discourse prominence. Cooperation was a great asset for other areas as well, since a probabilistic approach to prominence is highly relevant for prosodic and morphosyntactic prominence.

Contact: kehler(at)ling.ucsd.edu

Theodoros Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism & Language Development and Head of the Clinical Language Sciences Department in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading (UK). He is one of the most eminent researchers in the field of language acquisition and processing in interaction with literacy development, with a strong expertise in mixed model analyses of complex large data sets.

His main interests lie in bilingual/multilingual children with typical and atypical development (Specific Language Impairment, Autism) with a strong focus on morpho-syntax and up-to-date empirical methodology. He is currently involved in a very active research program involving English, Greek, and German, supervises a number of excellent junior researchers at the PhD and post-doc level, and has maintained DFG-funded collaborations before (most recently with Bittner/ZAS Berlin). Before his stay at the CRC, he supported several international interdisciplinary projects with great success as an outside advisor (cf. BALED/Tsimpli 2013-2015), and the CRC benefited greatly  from cooperation with Theodoros Marinis thanks to his linguistic as well as experimental expertise. CRC projects in Area C with a focus on processing and development, but also areas A and B (especially A02 and B06) gained valuable insights from his feedback on methodology and data analysis.

Contact: t.marinis(at)uni-konstanz.de

Bodo Winter is an Acting Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He is a leading researcher in language evolution, quantitative semantics and statistical methods in linguistics, having published over 40 articles, including book chapters and journal papers in interdisciplinary high impact journals (Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Cortex). He has taught a variety of advanced statistics and data modelling courses for linguists at various international institutions and summer schools and held over 60 conference presentations and invited talks. After completing an M.A. in General Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mā noa and being a Doctoral Fellow in phonetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Bodo Winter obtained his PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on large-scale quantitative analyses of corpora and lexica to study word meaning and how it changes over time.

Cooperation with Bodo Winter will be of great benefit because he has a background in phonetics, linguistics and cognitive science, making him ideal for this highly interdisciplinary collaborative research centre. Moreover, Bodo Winter has expert knowledge in statistical methods and modelling of dynamical systems that are useful for the proposed projects. Being able to consult him on advanced modelling topics remains an invaluable asset for the whole CRC, especially for Area A and Area C. Finally, Bodo Winter has already taught a number of advanced courses at the University of Cologne within the University-funded “Sprache im Labor” making him already familiar with the specific methodological demands of the projects involved.

Kontakt: b.winter(at)bham.ac.uk