My Dissertation
I am a PhD student at the Institute of Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. My dissertation in the fields of Phonology and Multimodality on the German language focuses on the temporal alignment of prosodic and gestural cues and how this alignment is influential in the marking of focus and in disambiguation. The measures used for this endeavor include precise measurements of the distance of acoustic and visual landmarks and considering the relation and timing of the cues in relation to speech constituents (temporally and semantically). In addition, I test the effects of gesture-speech mismatches in the perception and processing of speech. Conducting production and perception studies as well as investigating corpus data, my dissertation aims to progress the field of multimodality by contributing to research on the prosody-gesture link and by exploring effects of the interaction of prosody and gesture. My master thesis entitled “Co-speech Gestures, Information Structure and Prosody: A Corpus Study on Prominence Peak Alignment” served as a pilot for the dissertation project.
MultIS
I am also part of the DFG-funded project project “Co-speech gestures and prosody as multimodal markers of information structure” (MultIS) with PIs Frank Kügler and Pilar Prieto, and working together with Paula G. Sánchez-Ramón. MultIS is part of the DfG priority programme “Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives” (ViCom; DFG SPP 2392, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), which investigates linguistic and multimodal cues to communication from different perspectives.
The project is centrally concerned with the question how prosodic and gestural cues mark focus in two prosodically different languages, Catalan and German. Concretely, the project investigates empirically, how the presence of accentuation and gesture (in terms of manual gestures, head movements and eyebrow movements) and their prominence change in speech contexts which vary in their pragmatic relevance. For this purpose, the project developed a method for collecting multimodal data that balances controlling for linguistic contexts while eliciting spontaneous speech that facilitates the use of natural communicative body movement.
More
Beyond the field of multimodality, I have worked on the perceptual prosodic differences between prosodic language types as well as on the broader topic of iconicity.
I am involved in multiple interdisciplinary collaborations on the topic of multimodality and (visual) prominence, including the fields of phonetics, pragmatics, animal communication, virtual reality and cognitive linguistics.
My research has been accepted to be presented at several international conferences in the fields of phonology (e.g., TAI, Denmark (2021), PaPE, Nijmegen (2023), ICPhS, Prague (2023), Speech Prosody, Leiden (2024)) and multimodality (e.g., MMSYM, Barcelona (2023), MMSYM, Frankfurt (2024)) as well as topic-specific workshops (e.g., Workshop at IPrA, Brussels (2023), Multimodality in Social Interaction, Marseille (2024)). See a comprehensive list of my presentations in the “Presentations” tab.
I have taught introductory classes to Phonology at Goethe University Frankfurt and supervised three Bachelor’s theses on Phonology/Multimodality.I was student representative of the Bachelor and Master degrees at Goethe University Frankfurt and I am now representative of the Early Career Researchers of ViCom. I am also part of the ViCom steering committee.
I was involved in the organization of multiple conferences and other events at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Research interests
My research interests include multimodality, cognitive linguistics, prosody, prosodic typology, empirical methodology, iconicity and OT.