Postdoctoral Researcher: Testing Audiovisual Gesture-Speech Integration in MEG

Radboud University, Netherlands

Updated: over 1 year ago
Job Type: Temporary
Deadline: 02 Dec 2022

We are looking for an experienced postdoctoral researcher who will use rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) in MEG to test audiovisual integration of hand gestures and speech. This position is part of the ERC-funded HearingHands programme, investigating how temporal gesture-speech alignment contributes to audiovisual spoken communication across languages, populations and communicative settings.
As a postdoctoral researcher, you will use rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) in MEG to pinpoint the neurobiological mechanisms underlying gesture-speech integration. Specifically, you will test how simple up-and-down beat gestures influence lexical stress perception in real time, using the 'manual McGurk effect' (Bosker & Peeters, 2021, Proc Roy Soc B). Furthermore, you will compare typical behavioural and neural signatures of gesture-speech integration to those in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are known to demonstrate impairments in prosody processing and audiovisual integration. Finally, you will run a large-scale correlational study testing whether the participants' own gestural timing behaviour is linked to their use of gestural timing in audiovisual speech perception.


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