Simon Wehrle gave a keynote talk at the "Multimodality in Social Interactions (2.0)" workshop in Marseille. His talk was entitled "Gaze, intonation, and turn-taking across neurotypes and conversational contexts". The workshop focussed on various theoretical and methodological aspects in the field of multimodal communication and social interactions in humans and nonhumans (https://multimodalityinsocialinteractions20.wordpress.com/).

Congratulations! Hauke Lindstädt received the faculty award for outstanding M.A. theses by the University of Cologne's Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2024 summer semester). His thesis, which was supervised by Prof. Martine Grice, is entitled "Can you believe that? The prosody of non genuine polar questions in English".

Doris Mücke has given a keynote address on "Multidimensionality of prosodic prominence: From neurotypical to atypical speech patterns" at the 13th International Seminar on Speech Production, which took place from 13-17 May in Autrans, France. The ISSP was focused on different aspects of speech production including articulation, acoustics, neural substrates, motor control, disorders, and their links to perception, communication, development and language.

Tabea Thies was awarded the Innovation Award of the Parkinson Foundation in the category of Clinical Research at the German Congress for Parkinson's and Movement Disorders. She receives the prize of €100,000 for the project "Speech Motor Biomarkers in Parkinson's Disease". The project aims to expand current knowledge about speech motor deficits in individuals with Parkinson's disease in order to develop speech-based biomarkers for diagnostic and therapeutic speech interventions. To achieve this, the earliest onset of speech motor changes in isolated REM sleep behavior disorder and Parkinson's disease will be determined, enabling early detection of both conditions through automated speech recognition and facilitating early intervention therapies.

Learn more about the project in this informational video.

Stefan Baumann gave a keynote talk at a workshop on Prosody in Focus: Prominence Marking from Multiple Perspectives, as part of the 2024 annual meeting of the DGfS in Bochum. His talk was entitled "Multimodal Prosodic Prominence and its Role in Marking Information Structure".

The co-operative teaching project between the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) and the Paris Cité University (Université Paris Cité), which has developed from the Paris-Cologne Joint Seminar on "Variability in Speech Production and Perception" has officially come to an end. At the End-of-Semester Meeting held in person in Cologne, students were invited to share their collaborative semester projects amongst each other and attend a guest lecture from Mark Tiede, the invited expert, on different acoustic and articulatory techniques of measuring speech production and multimodality.

Learn more here.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne is advertising an Assistant Professorship in Phonetics (W1) with tenure track (W2) (f/m/d). The position is available at the earliest possible date. Follow this link for more information on the job offer and application process.

Martine Grice gave a keynote talk in Dublin at Interspeech 2023 the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. Her talk was entitled "What’s in a Rise? The Relevance of Intonation for Attention Orienting".

ViTraLiP is an international, co-operative teaching project between the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) and the Paris Cité University (Université Paris Cité). It has developed from the Paris-Cologne Joint Seminar on "Variability in Speech Production and Perception" (part of EduVEnture Cologne - IVAC 2021/2022), and is made possible thanks to funding provided by the DAAD. Its main focus is on the collaborative development of interdisciplinary linguistic projects and the presentation of virtual student projects in the field of experimental phonetics.

Learn more here.

We are pleased to announce that Doris Mücke received the Labex EFL International Chair at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. As part of this, she is giving a series of lectures on Speech Dynamics. The lectures are affiliated to the Laboratories of Excellence (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics). More information can be found here.

Wir haben die traurige Nachricht erhalten, dass unser ehemaliger Institutsleiter, Georg Heike, im Januar 2023 verstorben ist.
Er war Phonetiker, Komponist und vieles mehr für uns.

In Andenken an Georg Heike.

Congratulations to Simona Sbranna, who has been awarded the Franco Ferrero Award as author of the best article to appear in the forthcoming AISV series (Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce) 2023. The awarded article "S. Sbranna, S. Wehrle & M. Grice, The use of Backchannels and other Very Short Utterances by Italian learners of German", presented at the 18th AISV 2022 Conference held in Naples, can be downloaded here (preprint version).

This hybrid and interdisciplinary workshop aims to strengthen the international cooperation between neurologist and speech scientists working on neurospeech data. We look forward to discussing topics of speech motor control in the scientific and clinical context. For further details take a look at our schedule on the left.

Everyone who is interested in the workshop is welcome.

You can participate on site or online and the registration is free of charge.

If you would like to participate please sign up HERE and learn more about the event HERE.

We participate in the transnational teaching projects organized by the EduVEnture Cologne (IVAC). This is a virtual exchange program between the Université de Paris (Ioana Chitoran, Department of Linguistics) and the University of Cologne (Doris Mücke and Simon Rössig, IfL-Phonetik). Together we teach the MA course “Joint seminar on variability in speech production and perception” this semester. Invited speakers are Doug Whalen from Haskins Laboratories (New Haven) and Georgia Zellou (University of California). The course has been a success and is a look into the future of transitional teaching. The students from Paris and Cologne benefit from the connection of the experimental linguistic laboratories. A real-life exchange is also planned.

Dr. Simon Roessig has been awarded the Offermann-Hergarten Prize of the University of Cologne's Faculty of Arts and Humanities for his book Categoriality and continuity in prosodic prominence. The Offermann-Hergarten Foundation promotes young academics in the Humanities by awarding them with a monetary prize for their published work.

Congratulations Simon!

Congratulations! – Lena Pagel has been awarded a special mention for Best Oral Presentation for her talk on "Prominence relations and articulatory modifications in habitual and loud speech” at the 4th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe. The conference was held virtually from 21–23 June 2021. See the Student Award winners here

Als Stipendiatin im Integrated Track und Mercator Fellow bei a.r.t.e.s. promoviert Tabea Thies mit einer Arbeit zum Einfluss von Levodopa und tiefer Hirnstimulation auf die Sprechdynamik von PatientInnen mit Morbus Parkinson. Im Interview spricht sie über ihre vielversprechende Arbeit und die Praxisphase ihrer Promotion in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie.

Martine Grice gave a keynote address on Autosegmental Phonology at the annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS). The conference took place at the University of Freiburg (via zoom) from 23 to 26 February 2021.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

Tobias Schröer erhält den Fakultätspreis WS 2020/21 der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln für seine Bachelorarbeit zum Thema: "Investigating potential acoustic correlates of sonority: Intensity vs. periodic energy".

Leo Spitzer Prize 2020 for Martine Grice

Martine Grice was awarded the Leo Spitzer Prize 2020 for outstanding academic achievements.
Information about the winners of the Future Prizes 2020 can be found here.

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for our special issue on "Aging- and Disease-related Changes in Speech Production”. The guest editors are: Anne Hermes, Antje Mefferd and Tabea Thies. More info can be found here.

Congratulations to Aviad Albert, Francesco Cangemi and Martine Grice for winning the Prosody Visualisation Challenge at the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences in Melbourne this month. Their poster was entitled "Can you draw me a question?"

The Phonetics lab was well represented International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences with five talks plus an invited talk in the satellite workshop "Intonational Phonology of Typologically Rare or Understudied Languages"