ViTraLiP has developed from the Paris - Cologne Joint Seminar on "Variability in Speech Production and Perception" (part of EduVEnture Cologne - IVAC 2021/2022), and has exciting plans for the upcoming 2023 Summer and 23/24 Winter semester made possible thanks to funding provided by the DAAD. Its main focus is on the collaborative development of interdisciplinary linguistic projects and the presentation of virtual student projects in the field of experimental phonetics.

ViTraLiP starts off with a Kick-Off Meeting with our partners from the Paris Cité University in June 2023 in Paris. This will facilitate the creative brainstorming process for the participants while encouraging active networking for future potential collaborative work. Students will also have the opportunity to prepare for the joint seminar by listening to talks by guest lecturers at the University of Cologne throughout the summer semester 2023.

The main part of the project, the transnational virtual seminar, starts in the winter semester 2023/24. Its topic is the interface between language production and perception and its cognitive processing with a focus on multimodality. In mixed groups consisting of both Paris and Cologne students, the students will have discussions about literature on the topic, design virtual experiments as well as collaborate with guest lecturers joining the seminar for various workshops. After a semester's work of extensive research, an End-of-Project Meeting will be held in December 2023 in Colgone to present and discuss findings in person to conclude the project.

The teaching project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Doris Mücke (University of Cologne) and Prof. Dr. Ioana Chitoran (Paris Cité University).

The ViTraLiP Project has also been listed on the HRK Advance website as an example of good practice. The HRK Advance Project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, has a main goal to "Optimize Governance and Processes of Internationalization”, and specifically aims to advance the further development of higher education internationalization, especially in terms of legal and organizational issues from a institutional and systematic level. 

Click on the image above to take a closer look on the details of the ViTraLiP project, and how the project serves as an institutional anchoring for international university collaborations.

Prof. Dr. Doris Mücke (University of Cologne) is a professor at the IfL-Phonetics lab in Cologne. Her main research area are theories and methods in speech production and perception with a special focus on dynamical systems. She is investigating the interplay between phonetics and phonology with respect to prosody, intonation and articulation. She is also doing interdisciplinary research with neurologists to capture dynamic properties of speech motor control in aging and disease with a special focus on Deep Brain Stimulation and Medication in patients with Essential Tremor and Parkinson’s disease.

Prof. Dr. Ioana Chitoran (Paris Cité University) works at the interface between phonology and phonetics. Her main interest is in understanding the relationship between the temporal variability observed in speech and the emergence of phonological structure and phonological representations. Working within the laboratory phonology approach, she relies on experimental studies of speech production and perception to understand how phonotactic complexity emerges.

Prof. Dr. Hiyon Yoo (Paris Cité University) is interested in the prosody of languages. Using experimental techniques, she tries to answer the question how prosody interacts with other linguistic levels such as syntax and pragmatics in building meaning. Another axis of her research is the acquisition of prosody in second language acquisition.

Project assistants:

Elisa Herbig (left, University of Cologne)

Gyong Min Oh (right, University of Cologne)