PhD fellowship
Objectives:
When people are engaged in meaningful social interaction, they automatically and implicitly adjust their speech, vocal patterns and gestures to accommodate to others. Although these processes have extensively been explored at the behavioral level, very little is known about their neural underpinnings. Prior investigations have shown that suppression of alpha oscillations, overlaying sensorimotor regions, are a possible marker of action-perception coupling during non-speech interactive tasks (Tognoli & Kelso, 2015). The project, by running dual-EEG recordings, will investigate if behavioral speech alignment translates into identifiable brain oscillatory markers. Key objectives are (i) to develop and validate metrics to quantify phonetic accommodation during natural speech interactions and (ii) to identify electrophysiological markers of between-speaker convergence.
Expected results:
- A computational pipeline to extract accommodation phonetic patterns from audio data of speakers engaged in a meaningful social interaction;
- A significant contribution to the emerging field of hyper-scanning by exploring the neurophysiological correlates of phonetic convergence during conversations.
Based in Ferrara, Italy
Full-time three-year contract, starting September 2020
PhD enrolment at: University of Ferrara
Main supervisor’s institution: Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ferrara
Main supervisor: Prof Alessandro D’Ausilio
Secondments:
- Aix-Marseille University: making-up of linguistic material in both Italian and French, contribution to design of experimental set-up and to phonetic analyses (5,5 months);
- Humboldt University and Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin: Assessment of a repertoire of metrics for measuring phonetic convergence in conversational speech (5 months).
Co-supervisors’ institutions:
- Aix-Marseille University, France
- Humboldt University and Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany