© Universität Bielefeld
Area C: Linguistic creativity and cognition: resources in individual speakers
C01: Producing and understanding creative word formations
PIs: Prof. Dr. Joana Cholin/ Dr. Jana Häussler
C01 investigates the underlying cognitive processes involved in the production and comprehension of novel word formations like Dunkelflaute (lit. `dark wind lull’, `neither wind nor sunlight’) or Juniversum (a blend of June and universe). Combined experimentation will link the two processing sides, e.g., by using elicited productions as stimuli for comprehension experiments. We examine the role of individual differences in cognition by comparing creative language use in speaker groups with different cognitive capacities (e.g., mono-/multilingual speakers, speakers with/without cognitive impairment), thus allowing linguistic creativity to be integrated into psycholinguistic models.
Open Positions:
- PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, ideally with experience with experimental psycholinguistics and an interest in language production and/or word formation.
- PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in linguistics or a related field, ideally with experience with experimental psycholinguistics and an interest in language comprehension and/or word formation.
Details project C01 including open positions (.pdf)
C02: Multimodal creativity in speech-gesture production
PIs: Prof. Dr. Joana Cholin/ Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Kopp
C02 examines multimodal creativity in speech–gesture production and targets the underlying processes by investigating how creativity in language is enabled or constrained by being combined with the gestural modality and how this interplay is further conditioned by communicative or cognitive demands. We will identify patterns of multimodal creativity by combining behavioural experiments with psycholinguistic and computational AI modelling. The ultimate goal is to develop a cognitive-computational model that accounts for general mechanisms and processes of multimodal creativity.
Open Positions:
- PhD position (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in computational linguistics, computer science or a related field, ideally with experience in machine learning techniques.
- PostDoc position (100%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a PhD in linguistics or a related with a focus on experimental psycholinguistics and experience in computational modeling.
Details project C02 including open positions (.pdf)
C03: Creativity in verbal and multi-modal communication of people with neurogenic language and communication disorders
PIs: Dr. Carola De Beer/ Prof. Dr. Martina Hielscher-Fastabend/ Dr. Kerstin Richter
C03 focuses on multimodal creativity in people (i) with aphasia (PWA) or (ii) with cognitive communication disorders (PCCD) compared to unimpaired persons. C03 will investigate how PWA and PCCD creatively use their preserved verbal and gestural communicative capacities. This will be examined under different task demands (e.g., naming tasks, sentence completion, a taboo paradigm or constraining the output modality) and by including linguistic material of varying complexity (e.g., compound nouns and complex verbs). The influence of cognitive and emotional processing on creativity in PWA and PCCD will also be central in project C03.
Open Positions:
- PhD position 1 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in Clinical Linguistics or a related field and a research interest as well as some clinical experience in assessment within the field of neurogenic language and communication disorders. Basic methodological knowledge in experimental research and statistical data analysis is beneficial.
- PhD position 2 (65%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in Clinical Linguistics or a related field and a research interest as well as some clinical experience in assessment within the field of neurogenic language and communication disorders. Basic methodological knowledge in experimental research and statistical data analysis is beneficial. An interest in multimodal communication is required, but experience in this area of research is not necessary.
Details project C03 including open positions (.pdf)
C04: On the role of linguistic creativity in the language use of mono- and multilingual children with vs without developmental language disorders
PIs: Prof. Dr. Martina Hielscher-Fastabend/ Prof. Dr. Katharina Rohlfing/ Prof. Dr. Julia Settinieri
By investigating different groups of four to five-year-old children, C04 addresses individual-level linguistic creativity in word formation. It takes a comparative approach, contrasting the creative forms produced by mono- vs. multilingual children with typical vs. impaired language development at the verbal and non-verbal level when coping with lexical gaps. An additional focus will be on the influence of cognition and temperament, emotional and situational constraints. Project C04 will model creativity as a part of the individual learning process and the developing mental lexicon, aiming to focus on dialogues, thus revealing how creative naming strategies foster understanding.
Open Positions:
- PhD position 1 (65%, Paderborn University) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psycholinguistics or a closely related field with a special emphasis on gestures and multimodal analysis of communication as well as some experience in working with preschool children.
- PhD position 2 (65%, Bielefeld University) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in German as a foreign/second language or a closely related field, including some training in qualitative as well as quantitative empirical methods and a focus on analysing learner language.
Details project C04 including open positions (.pdf)
C05: Verbal fluency as a window into the mechanisms of creative language production
PIs: Prof. Dr. Johanna Kissler/ Dr. Martin Wegrzyn
Project C05 will use verbal fluency tasks to gain insights into the mechanisms of creative language production. We will use different semantic and emotional word categories to characterise the cognitive and cerebral resources that play a role in linguistic creativity. To better understand how inter-individual and situational variability influences creative language production, verbal fluency tasks will be related to cognitive, affective and personality traits of speakers and will be performed under different conditions, including dyadic interactions.
Open Positions:
- PhD position 1 (75%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psychology or a related field, with a focus on experimental methods and affective and social neuroscience, including fMRI. Ideally, the person is familiar with computational modeling using R or Python.
- PhD position 2 (75%) Profile: The ideal candidate has a master in psychology or a related field, prior experience in programming (e.g. Python), computational modeling and fMRI data acquisition and analysis (e.g. Representational Similarity Analysis).