Interdisciplinary research group CoCo
Our mission
CoCo stands for the Cologne group on Conversation in Collaborative and Cooperative Contexts.
We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers that places face-to-face communication at the heart of our work. We bring together perspectives from linguistics, phonetics, psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive (neuro-)science to investigate the multimodal nature of human interaction. We are committed to capturing the richness and diversity of conversational signals in human communication styles, including those across neurotypes (e.g., autism, schizophrenia), and across languages, such as how speaking in a second language affects communication.
Central to our approach is to recognise that there is no single "typical" communication style, not even within an individual, as this may shift depending on context and conversational partner. The variety of human behaviour we seek to highlight in our research is mirrored in the broad variety of methodologies we employ, integrating our diverse academic backgrounds and disciplines. Our emphasis on exploratory research enables us to approach the complexities of human communication with an open mind. We have conducted extensive studies on intonation and social eye gaze. In our most recent work, we are paying particular attention to the interplay of speech and gesture in speakers and listeners and the multiple factors affecting what is perceived as rapport.
Members of Coco
Funding for our research
Project “Individual behaviour in encoding and decoding prosodic prominence”
Project A02 at the CRC 1252 Prominence in Language
This project investigates the interplay of prosodic prominence, discourse prominence, and interactional prominence as structuring principles in dyadic conversation. We explore the behaviour of autistic as well as non-autistic and native as well as non-native speakers. On the basis of different conversational contexts, we examine these and other sources of speaker variability as well as dyad-specific patterns in the use and interpretation of multimodal cues (e.g., intonation, hand and head gestures, backchannels, and eye gaze).
Webpage: https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/en/projects/a02-individual-specificity
Project “Communicative behaviour in multimodal dyadic face-to-face conversation: with a focus on eye-gaze and the effect of cognitive styles”
by Qualitätsverbesserungskomission of the University Clinic Cologne
Project “Confidential Interaction using Eye-Contact (CUE)”
by Priority Programme UGaze Ulm
Webpage: https://www.ugaze.de/projects/cue/