About

I am currently a research assistant at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and u, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen. With Wim Pouw, I am working on several projects investigating the biomechanics of speech and gestures, more specifically the interplay of upper-body muscle activity, posture, and voice production.

Before that, I was a PhD student in the PINTS project which focused on pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication. In my dissertation titled The phonetics of speech breathing: pauses, physiology, acoustics, and perception, I focussed on pauses and audible breath noises that are produced along with speech. That included work on pauses across languages, speech tempos, and in natural and synthetic speech. For breath noises, I investigated how much information listeners could auditorily extract from them about the speaker’s age and sex, and how the breath was taken (for example oral or nasal, inhalation or exhalation). Finally, I examined the acoustic characteristics of breath noises, correlated them with a physiological parameter (torso expansion), and used 3D-printed vocal tract models to model breath noises and approach how speech breathing may be performed in the vocal tract. My supervisors in the Phonetics and Phonology research group at Saarland University were Prof. Dr. Bernd Möbius and Dr. Jürgen Trouvain.