Research & Projects
My research interests lie in the fields of speech science and speech and language technology. Much of my recent work has focused on speech fluency in preschool children, combining phonetic analysis, human judgments, and computational methods.
Doctoral Research
Automatic Assessment of Speech Fluency in Preschool Children
My doctoral research investigates how speech fluency in preschool children can be assessed using computational methods.
The work combines analyses of children's speech with human fluency judgments and automatic approaches to disfluency detection and fluency assessment. It examines how these different sources of information can be used to develop and evaluate computational methods for assessing children's speech fluency.
This research was conducted in the context of the WUSCHEL project at Saarland University.
WUSCHEL – Language Assessment in Early Childhood Education
WUSCHEL is a research project concerned with the semi-automatic assessment of language proficiency in preschool children.
As part of the project, I have worked on the analysis and assessment of speech fluency, investigating how properties of children's spoken language can be evaluated using both human judgments and computational methods.
WUSCHEL website →Sound Symbolism
Another area of my research interests is sound symbolism: the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings or associations they evoke. I explored this topic in two research projects during my studies.
A Computational Model to Replicate Human Sound Symbolic Associations
In my master's thesis, I developed a computational approach to generating artificial words based on the visual characteristics of geometric shapes.
The model combines automatic shape recognition with a word-generation algorithm informed by sound-symbolic associations. Its output was evaluated through experimental studies.
Sound Symbolism in Pokémon Names
In an experimental study, I investigated how German speakers associate speech sounds with the size and weight of Pokémon.
Participants selected between artificially constructed names for different Pokémon. The results showed systematic preferences for particular consonants and vowels depending on the creatures' size.
Further Research Interests
Beyond these projects, I am also interested in dialectal variation, particularly regional varieties of German.