Postdoctoral Researcher: SPRINT Project, Speech Production

Do you wish to join a high-level research team working jointly on an innovative research project spanning the fields of phonetics, phonology and pragmatics? This postdoctoral job opportunity is part of SPRINT (Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication), a research 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. The project also involves a collaboration with Chris Cummins (Edinburgh) and Yiya Chen (Leiden) as senior scientists. You will work closely with the PI, senior scientists and the other members of the team.

You will be a key contributor to SPRINT, working alongside the PI, other postdocs, 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.

Specifically, you will have primary responsibility for one of the two main strands of SPRINT’s research, the processing of intonation in English and Greek, using behavioural experiments, and primarily eye-tracking and EEG. The aim of your research will be to probe the relevance of production findings for the processing of intonation. Your research will involve:
(a) designing behavioural experiments on the processing of intonation, including experiments following existing paradigms (such as betting) and developing new paradigms suitable for intonation research; the languages tested with these experiments are English and Greek;
(b) designing experiments related to the above, but using eye-tracking and EEG; the languages tested with these experiments are English and Greek;
(c) Setting up, collecting and analysing the resulting data.

To ensure the above tasks are completed, you will both supervise local assistants and contribute to the above tasks yourself. Data collection is likely to involve travel to the UK and Greece.