On the first day of arrival, the students from the Université Paris Cité were greeted by the students of the University of Cologne at the Phonetics Lab. Everyone had the pleasure of meeting their project partners in person after having worked together virtually since October. Students were invited for an indepth tour of the Phonetics Lab and further given time to dicuss the collaborative group presentations that were to be held the next day. 

The students gathered around once more at the Phoetics Lab to share the one page proposals that the students have been working on. This proposal not only serves as the basis for the final project, a 5 page proceedings paper, but also as a means to combine the two Labs', both Cologne and Paris, and exchange different methodologies and approaches to conduct state of the art research within the field of experimental phonetics. All proposals that were presented this day is accessible on the margin section on this page. 

Later that evening, the Cologne and Paris students had the pleasure of inviting guest lecturer Mark Tiede (Yale University & Haskins, USA), a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories with primary research interests lying within speech production. After a lively discussion on the theoretical background of acoustic vs. articulatory targets in speech planning as well as dabbling into mulitmodal data collection and a vigorous Q&A session, the day slowly came to an end. 

The 12th of October marked the official start of the semester. The proud participants of the ViTraLiP project joined together in a virtual get-togehter to finally meet one another in a heartwarming introductory session. Meet all 25 students of the Winter 23/24 Paris-Cologne Joint Seminar. We spent our first session together getting to know one another and cross introducing ourselves before we took a "photo" together as a remembrance of a promising beginning!

Students from the University of Cologne visited the Paris Cité University to get introdouced to future project partners and to get a tour of the Phonetics Lab.

Both students from the University of Cologne and Paris Cité University were invited to listen into a talk given by Prof. Dr. Doris Mücke, the project manager of ViTraLiP, as part of LabEx EFL (Laboratoire d’excellence “Fondements Empiriques de la Linguistique”) at Sorbonne University in Paris (Sorbonne Université). The talk was given on “Modelling unpredictable patterns in speech production” and how to deal with variable data. Students were welcomed to both observe and partake in thepost-talk discussions. It was an opportunity to expose themselves to various methodologies and mentally prepare for difficulties and critiques that one should take into consideration when setting up experiments. 

The students from each university were gathered together for a Kick-Off Meeting. Students were given time to get to know one another better by introducing themselves to each other and conversing about their research interests in regards to language production and perception and its cognitive processing. Together, the students discussed future project outlooks and those who were already in the process of conducting their own research were invited to hold a brief presentation on their determined topics. This international exchange gave students the opportunity to share various different methods that are both prevalent and commonly used within each lab.