PhD student “Morphology in spoken word recognition models”

Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen

Supervision: Louis ten Bosch, Mirjam Ernestus, and Ingo Plag

Starting date: September / October 2019

Duration: 4 Years (3 years, with possibility of extension of 1 year)

Salary: Around 1600 euros a month

The project is part of the project DMC: Dutch morphologically complex words: The role of morphology in speech production and comprehension of the Spoken Morphology: Phonetics and phonology of complex words DFG research unit FOR 2373. It is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

See http://www.spoken-morphology.hhu.de/en.html

Requirements:

We are looking for candidates with

• Master degrees in Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or Social Sciences;

• Clear interest in speech and language;

• Expertise in quantitative research methods, preferably including large scale data analyses or computational modeling;

• Effective verbal and written communicative skills in English.

Application:

Please send your motivation letter and extensive resume (including grades for all university courses) to m.ernestus@let.ru.nl.

The deadline is 15 March 2019 or until the position is filled.

Questions:

l.tenbosch@let.ru.nl or m.ernestus@let.ru.nl

Abstract:

The PhD student will study what properties a computational model of auditory word recognition needs to have in order to well simulate human listeners’ processing of morphologically complex words. The computational models that will be considered are DIANA (e.g., ten Bosch et al., 2013, 2014, 2015) and Naïve Discriminative Learning (NDL, e.g., Arnold et al. 2017), since these two models represent very different types of processing and both can receive the speech signal, with morpho-acoustic cues, as their inputs. The human data to be simulated will include the BALDEY database (Ernestus & Cutler, 2015). The PhD student will produce a dissertation consisting of several publishable articles, preceded by a General Introduction and followed by a general discussion.