Postdoctoral Researcher: SPRINT project

Intonation in human speech is essential for communication, as it conveys information about the speaker’s intent to listeners. As a postdoctoral researcher, you aim to understand how intonation is structured and functions in communication as a key contributor to the ERC-funded SPRINT project.

As a postdoctoral researcher you will join the team of SPRINT (Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication), a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Prof Amalia Arvaniti. SPRINT investigates the phonetics, phonology and pragmatics of intonation in a number of varieties of English and Greek, examining both production and perception. Currently, the SPRINT team includes two postdoctoral researchers; a third postdoc will join SPRINT in early 2022. The team also includes a number of assistants at four locations in the UK and Greece.

You will be a key contributor to SPRINT, working alongside the PI, other postdoctoral RAs, local assistants, and the project's lab manager. You will undertake and manage primarily quantitative research addressing the research questions tackled by the project, author research papers on these questions (in collaboration with the rest of the team), and disseminate project research in seminars, workshops, conferences and public engagement activities, thereby contributing to the promotion of SPRINT in social media and other online platforms.

More specifically, you will have primary responsibility for two main strands of SPRINT’s research: (a) the collection, management, annotation, analysis and modelling of Greek and English data (the latter to a lesser extent), from Athens and Corfu and the South East of England and Bristol respectively; (b) the preparation and conduction of behavioural experiments related to the outcomes of the production research. For both strands, you will both supervise local assistants and contribute to the above tasks yourself.

You will have to be proactive and work independently for most of the time, under the PI's direction, and as part of a team, balancing multiple project demands so as to complete research according to the project's deadlines.