34.2885, Support: Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics: PhD, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Tue Oct 3 19:05:04 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2885. Tue Oct 03 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2885, Support: Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics: PhD, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

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Date: 29-Sep-2023
From: Angela Heuts [Angela.Heuts at mpi.nl]
Subject: Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics: PhD, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Institution/Organization: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Department: Multimodal Language
Web Address:
https://www.mpi.nl/department/multimodal-language-department/23

Level: PhD

Specialty Areas: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; General
Linguistics

Description:

Interaction between gesture and prosody in structuring information:
The case of negation

A four-year fully funded PhD position in the Multimodal Language
Department.

Doctoral supervisors: Prof. Asli Özyürek (MPI, Radboud University),
Assoc. Prof. Hatice Zora (MPI, Stockholm University), Dr. Peter Uhrig
(TU Dresden).

Job description:
For successful communication speakers constantly need to make choices
to organize linguistic information in ways fitting their and their
interlocutors’ communicative needs at the sentence, discourse and
dialogic levels. This is called information structure (IS). Devices
that mark IS are diverse ranging from prosodic marking to
(morpho)syntactic means as well as gesture. Given the multimodal
aspect of communication, the present project aims to investigate
gesture (hand, head, facial) as means of expressing IS and its
interaction with prosody and morphosyntactic choices in a given
language. The project takes an integrated production and perception
perspective, even though the emphasis will be on production patterns,
and aims to account for language-specific characteristics.

The target language to be investigated is Turkish, which is a
verb-final language, with relatively flexible word order driven by
information structure, and the linguistic phenomenon to be
concentrated on is negation. The main questions to be addressed are i)
how do interlocutors use gesture, prosody and morphosyntax in an
integrated way to mark negation in Turkish, ii) whether and to what
extent gestural marking aligns with prosodic marking iii) how does
such multimodal patterning of negation information influence the
comprehension and interpretation of negation and its scope.

These questions will primarily be investigated using a corpus-driven
approach, and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a video
corpus (e.g. YouTube materials, elicited lab data) in order to gain a
systematic understanding of the interplay between gesture, prosody and
negation markers in sentence, discourse and dialogic contexts. The
candidate will also learn to use automatic machine learning tools
(e.g. Open Pose) to detect gestural markers of negation in big
corpora. The predictions will then be validated by experimental
methods of multimodal language comprehension regarding interactions
between prosody and gesture. If time allows, (neuro)psycholinguistic
investigation of the integration process from multiple channels in
dialogue will be carried out and combined with a cross-linguistic
approach.

Project will be led by an interdisciplinary team, by Prof. Asli
Özyürek (https://www.mpi.nl/people/ozyurek-asli), an expert in human
crosslinguistic multimodal language use and processing at the
Multimodal Language Department of Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics and Dr Hatice Zora
(https://www.mpi.nl/people/zora-hatice) an expert in use, neural and
cognitive processing of prosody and information structure and Dr.
Peter Uhrig (https://peter-uhrig.de/), an expert in multimodal corpus
and computational linguistics.

Application Deadline: 01-Nov-2023

Web Address for Applications: https://www.mpi.nl/career-education/vaca
ncies/vacancy/phd-position-multimodal-language-department-1

Contact Information:
If you have questions about the post that you wish to discuss before
you apply, please email the Multimodal Language Department Director
Prof. Asli Özyürek at asli.ozyurek at mpi.nl.

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