5 November: fyi -- postgrad funding, Tilburg
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The Faculty of Arts at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) announces a
full-time position for a
PhD student
This position is connected to the VIDI-project "Functions of audiovisual
prosody" (vacancy number 810.02.17).
Starting date: January 1, 2003
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
Salary
The selected candidate will get a four year contract (full-time) as a PhD
student. The salary will be EUR 1.551 at the start of the project and EUR
2.103 at the end.
Applications
Written applications with curriculum vitae have to be sent by November 29,
2002 to
Tilburg University, Arts Faculty
Drs. O. Zweekhorst, Faculty Director
Room U 40
P.O. Box 90153
5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands
Or by email: solliciterenFDL@uvt.nl
More detailed information on this PhD position (and on the VIDI-project) can
be obtained from Marc Swerts (m.g.j.swerts@tue.nl), or 040 - 247 52 56). See
also http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/flw/pcdm/
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