I am a researcher in Research Unit 5757: Weak Elements in Phonology, Project WE 5 - Unlearning distributions of weak elements: Evidence from German-Turkish learners of L3 French based at the University of Mainz.
My research focuses on the production and perception of prosodic prominence. During my doctoral studies, I have been particularly interested in inter-individual variability in the use of prominence. Recently, I have developed an interest in multimodal prosody and the contribution of gestures to prominence marking.
News
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Data collection in Ankara complete
The first phase of data collection in my new project is complete! A week ago, I returned from Ankara after two intense weeks of collecting production and perception data from Turkish learners of French for our project on the L3 acquisition of French prosody. My colleague Özce Özceçelik and I had a great time in Ankara, where we were hosted by the wonderful İpek Pınar Uzun at the NÖROM lab. We are also grateful for our wonderful student assistant Serdar Servet, who helped us immensely with the acquisition and scheduling of participants. Now we are looking forward to presenting first results at the upcoming AMLaP, P&P, and SNL conferences!
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Three papers at Speech Prosody 2026
Speech Prosody 2026 is coming up and I am happy to be involved in three wonderful papers. 1) Together with Jeremy Steffman and Stefan Baumann, I examined the nature of German pitch accent types from a production and a perception side to address the question Are pitch accent types more than just phonetic cue bundles? 2) Bianca Maria De Paolis, Stefan Baumann, and I investigated how Italian learners of L2 German adjust their use of prosody and syntax to signal focus in new production data that Bianca collected during her fellowship in Cologne last year. 3) And finally, Klymentii Myslyvyi, Stefan Baumann, and I looked at multimodal prosody in a German Ted talk and found Evidence for the additive nature of gestural and accentual prominence in form and timing.
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TAI proceedings paper out now
Our TAI 2025 proceedings paper (co-authored by Stefan Baumann) is out now! You can read it here. In this paper, we combine insights from a production and a perception study to investigate form- and meaning-related aspects of prominence in German. We find that lexical newness and the initial sentence position boost the prosodic prominence of a word in production, while the perception of prominence is crucially influenced by prosodic form, especially accent status, word duration, and pitch accent type, but not by meaning directly.
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New position
Big news! Last week I started my new position at the University of Mainz in Project WE 5 - Unlearning distributions of weak elements: Evidence from German-Turkish learners of L3 French as part of the Research Unit 5757: Weak Elements in Phonology. I am especially excited to return to working on Turkish prosody, a topic that I have been interested in since my Master’s studies at the University of Würzburg.
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Hello, world!
Welcome to my website!