ViTraLiP has developed from the Paris - Cologne Joint Seminar on "Variability in Speech Production and Perception" (part of EduVEnture Cologne - IVAC 2021/2022). At its core, the project is a transnational virtual seminar jointly held by Université Paris Cité and the University of Cologne, focusing on the interface between speech production and perception and its cognitive processing, with particular attention to multimodality. The seminar has so far been offered in the winter semesters of 2023/24 and 2024/25, where participants in mixed groups consisting of students from both Paris and Cologne engaged in discussions of relevant literature, collaboratively design virtual experiments, and work with guest lecturers who contribute to the seminar through specialized workshops.

In Winter Semester 2023/24, the seminar began with a kick-off meeting with our partners at Université Paris Cité in June 2023. This event aimed to spark creative collaboration and encourage networking for potential future projects. During the Summer Semester 2023, students had the opportunity to prepare for the seminar by attending guest lectures at the University of Cologne. The semester concluded with an End-of-Project Meeting in December 2023 in Cologne, where students came together to present and discuss their findings in person.

The seminar continued in 2024, culminating in an end-of-semester workshop where students presented their group projects on speech production and perception. The event also featured invited talks by Anisia Popescu and Johanna Cronenberg. Additionally, participants had the chance to attend a talk by Sam Kirkham in the SRPP seminar series, where he spoke about dynamic modeling in speech production.

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

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)