Meet the team

November 2023. Credit: Isa Emmen
November 2023. Credit: Isa Emmen

Principal Investigator

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Hans Rutger Bosker

Assistant Professor

Speech Perception, Audiovisual Integration, Prosody, Gestures, Lexical Stress, Speech Rate, Speech in Noise

Postdocs

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Matteo Maran

Postdoctoral Researcher

Audiovisual Integration, Language-related ERPs, Neural Basis of Language Comprehension, Neurodevelopmental Disorders

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Patrick Louis Rohrer

Postdoctoral Researcher

Gestures, Prosody, Gesture-Speech synchrony, Speech Perception, Audiovisual Integration, Cognition, (Multimodal) Language Acquisition (L1/L2), Pragmatics

PhD students

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Floris Cos

PhD student

Speech Perception, Beat Gestures, Prosody, Lexical Stress

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Orhun Uluşahin

PhD student

Speech Perception, Speech Production, Phonetic Convergence, Talker Familiarity

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Ronny Bujok

PhD student

Speech Perception, Beat Gestures, Prosody, Lexical Stress

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Chengjia Ye

PhD student

Speech Perception, Speech Production, Prosody, Audiovisual Integration

Students

Students regularly contribute to our research in the form of BA/MA theses, lab rotations, internships, honours projects, or as student-assistants. Current student projects include:

  • Yuting Sun (Leiden University) is running an internship looking at audiovisual prominence in tone languages Mandarin and Cantonese;
  • Sarah Kapp (Freiburg University) is writing her MA thesis on a project testing how people tune into a particular talker’s habitual speech rate;
  • Renske Rötjes and Anna Schreurs are writing their BA theses on how different artificially generated visual cues (e.g., avatars) influence spoken word recognition;
  • Tim Kolleth, Fenna Seebregts, and Lorin Wolfs are running a BA honours project testing how the manual McGurk effect works in English;
  • Silvia Dragan and Kelly Karremans are doing individual lab rotations in the group;
  • Beatrice Caddeo is supporting research in the position of student-assistant;
  • Roos Rossen is speer-heading a one-year team science project aiming to engage the larger public with our research through the Donders Citylab.

And these are the names of bright students who in the past wrote their BA/MA thesis in the group or who did an internship or temporary research project with us. You will find some of their names appear as authors on our publications.

Elhaam Hasan, Senne Voermans, Iris Hulzebosch, Jasmijn Pieters, Renske Uilenreef, Yitian Hong, Ivy Mok, Eleni Zimianiti, Christina Papoutsi, Nora Kennis, Myriam Weiß, Marie Stadtbäumer, Vilde Reksnes, Jeonga Kim, Marjolein van Os, Rebecca Wogan, Rik Does, Wibke Naumann, Anna Ravenschlag.

Former PhDs

In August 2024, Giulio Severijnen received approval from the reading committee to defend his thesis, entitled A blessing in disguise: How prosodic variability challenges but also aids successful speech perception. The defense will take place early 2025.

On 19th Jan, 2021, Greta Kaufeld successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled Investigating spoken language comprehension as perceptual inference. After her PhD, she took up a position at Disney Research Studios.

On 24th Sept, 2020, Joe Rodd successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled How speaking fast is like running: modelling control of speaking rate. After his PhD, he took up a position at the ‘Dienst Uitvoering Onderwijs’ [DUO].

On 12th Dec, 2019, Merel Maslowski successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled Fast speech can sound slow: effects of contextual speech rate on word recognition. After her PhD, she took up a position at Royal Dutch Kentalis.