PhD Position (m/f/d) in Project A01 - Collaborative Research Center 1252

PhD Position (m/f/d) in Project A01
Collaborative Research Center 1252 | Prominence in Language

The University of Cologne is one of the largest and most research-intensive universities in Germany, offering a wide range of subjects. With its six faculties and its interfaculty centres, it offers a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines and internationally outstanding profile areas, supported by the administration with its services.

The Cologne Collaborative Research Centre 1252 | Prominence in Language is a dynamic research environment with 20 projects in linguistics and related fields. The PhD position advertised is for project A01 “Intonation and attention orienting: Neurophysiological and behavioural correlates” with principal investigators Petra Schumacher and Martine Grice. The goal of A01 is to understand the role of prosody in orienting the attention of the listener, with a particular focus on intonational rises. To this aim we shall relate a detailed analysis of selected prosodic parameters to prominence ratings from naive listeners and investigate the time course of prosodic processing using event-related potentials. A key question is whether rises in pitch are purely linguistic, signaling which parts of the message are important, or should be seen as attracting attention at a more basic cognitive level.

YOUR TASKS

• carry out phonetic and phonological analysis of intonation, including visualization of prosodic parameters
• based on the above analysis, prepare speech stimuli for experiments
• design, run and analyze ERP experiments (German)
• design, run and analyze web-based prominence rating experiments (Maltese and Maltese English in collaboration with University of Malta
• present your results at international conferences and in academic journals

YOUR PROFILE

• You are familiar with research on prosody and/or electrophysiology.
• You have experience with R or other programming languages.
• You are highly proficient in German and English.
• You are capable of working in a team and working at the interface to related projects.
• You are capable of quickly adapting to new research topics.

WE OFFER YOU

• a diverse and fair working environment
• support in reconciling work and family life
• flexible working time models, full-time positions suitable for job sharing
• extensive advanced training opportunities
• occupational health management offers
• local transport ticket at a discount for UoC employees

The position is available from 01.04.2021 on a part-time basis (25,89 hours per week / 65%). It is limited to 31.12.2024. If the applicant meets the relevant wage requirements and personal qualifications, the salary is based on remuneration group 13 TV-L of the pay scale for the German public sector.

The University of Cologne is committed to equal opportunities and diversity. Women are especially encouraged to apply and will be considered preferentially in accordance with the Equal Opportunities Act of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landesgleichstellungsgesetz – LGG NRW). We also expressly welcome applications from people with disabilities / special needs or of equal status.

Please send your convincing application by email (in one pdf-file) to application-sfb1252@uni-koeln.de with the reference number Wiss2012-24. Applications should include a cover letter (describing the applicant’s qualifications and motivation for this position), CV, a sample of writing (if possible), and copies of the relevant university degree(s) including transcripts. Please do not include a photo with your application.): In addition to the usual documents, please send your Master‘s thesis or, if it has not yet been completed, if possible two to three preliminary chapters of the Master‘s thesis as well as two representative term papers. The application deadline is 31.01.2021.