LINGUIST List 13.2842

Tue Nov 5 2002

Support: Audiovisual Prosody: PhD Tilburg U, Netherlands

Editor for this issue: Heather Taylor <heatherlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. m.g.j.swerts, Support: Audiovisual Prosody: PhD student, Tilburg Univ, Netherlands

University or Organization: Tilburg University
Department: Faculty of Arts
Rank: PhD student
Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics, Phonetics, Pragmatics,
audiovisual prosody


Description:
		 
The VIDI-project "Functions of audiovisual prosody" is concerned with
a functional approach to verbal and visual prosody in spoken
conversations. The problem to be addressed in the project is about the
combined use of specific auditive cues (such as intonation, tempo, and
pausing) and specific visual cues (such as facial expressions and
specific body gestures) for marking different dialogue phenomena. The
ultimate goal of the project is to create an empirically based,
computational model of audiovisual prosody that can be used both for
production and perception, which computes the communicative function
of an utterance by integrating the contribution of cues from different
sources (visual, verbal and lexico-syntactic).

We are looking for a PhD student who, in collaboration with a team of
other researchers, wants to study the cue value of audiovisual prosody
for signaling a number of communicative functions: turn-taking,
information structure, feedback signals, and emotional/attitudinal
connotations of utterances. To this end, he or she will make use of
two different research techniques, i.e., (i) by studying audiovisual
features of human speakers in experimentally elicited speech data, and
(ii) by testing explicit hypotheses on the communicative role of
audiovisual prosody by means of synthetic stimuli whose visual and
auditive properties are systematically varied. The different
communicative functions to be addressed in this project need to be
tackled from both an acoustic and a perceptual perspective. In
addition, while most of the work will concentrate on analyses of
Dutch, it is important to compare the outcome of the study of this
language with the results for other languages.

Requirements:
- strong preference for a linguist, who is experienced with and has
strong affinity with experimental psycholinguistic research, or a
psycholinguist who is experienced with and has strong affinity with
linguistic research
- knowledge of statistical techniques is essential
- good programming skills and experience with audiovisual hard- and
software are recommended


Address for Applications:

	Attn: Drs O. Zweekhorst
	Tilburg University, Faculty of Arts
	P.O. Box 90153
	Tilburg, 5000 LE
	Netherlands 
	Applications are due by 29-Nov-2002


Contact Information:
	Dr Marc Swerts.
	Email: m.g.j.swertstue.nl
	Tel: +31 40 2475256
	Website: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/flw/pcdm/