

Carly A. Anderson
(Associate Member)
University College London
carly.anderson@ucl.ac.uk
Carly is a Senior Research Fellow, hosted by Professor Mairéad MacSweeney, in the Visual Communication Group at the University College London (UCL) Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN) and the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL). She is funded by a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship and is a visiting researcher on Prof Schweinberger et al.’s ViCom project.
Carly is interested in how we perceive visual cues from the face (lipreading and emotion), and how these can be integrated with auditory cues from the voice to support communication. Her research focusses on how these processes are impacted by our sensory experience (deafness and cochlear implantation) and our language experience (bilingualism, spoken and signed language exposure), both at the behavioural and cortical level.
Selected publications
- Anderson, C.A., Cushing, S.L., Papsin, B.C., Gordon, K.A. (2022). Cortical imbalance following delayed restoration of bilateral hearing in deaf adolescents. Human Brain Mapping, 43 (12), 3662-3679. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25875
- Anderson, C.A., Wiggins, I.M., Kitterick, P.T., Hartley, D.E.H. (2017). Adaptive benefit of cross-modal plasticity following cochlear implantation in deaf adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 114 (38), 10256-10261. https://doi:10.1073/pnas.1704785114
- Anderson, C.A., Lazard, D.S., Hartley, D.E.H. (2017). Plasticity in bilateral superior temporal cortex: Effects of deafness and cochlear implantation on auditory and visual speech processing. Hearing Research, 343, 138-149. https://doi:10.1016/j.heares.2016.07.013
Conference abstracts: - Gregoire-Mitha, N., Barton, J. J., MacSweeney, M., & Anderson, C. A. (2022). Impact of visual speech on gaze following in monolingual and bilingual adults. Journal of Vision, 22(14), 3360-3360. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3360
- Anderson, C., Schweinberger, S. (2022). Multimodal socio-emotional communication: basic mechanisms and functioning in altered sensory and central conditions. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14139


Kathryn Barnes
(Associate Member)
Goethe University Frankfurt
barnes@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Kathryn Barnes is a doctoral researcher in formal semantics at Goethe University. She completed her BA in French and German Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016 and her MA in Linguistics at The University of Manchester in 2019, where her thesis was based on fieldwork on the semantics of modal verbs in Malay. Her research has since turned to iconicity, with a particular focus on ideophones, including experimentally investigating the meaning and at-issue status of ideophones crosslinguistically, as well as developing a semantic account for the phenomena. She is also interested in exploring how ideophones interact with other iconic enrichments such as gestures and understanding ideophone-like constructions in other modalities, for example classifier constructions and idiomatic signs in sign language.
Selected publications
- Barnes, K. R., Ebert, C., Hörnig, R., & Stender, T. (2022). The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5827


Marion Bonnet
(Associate Member, PhD Candidate)
University of Göttingen
marion.bonnet@uni-goettingen.de
Marion Bonnet graduated in 2021 from the University of Paris, France, where she received her Bachelor and Master in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. Since September 2021, she is affiliated with Göttingen University and works as a PhD student for the IDEAlISM project (collaboration of UCL, Frankfurt and Göttingen University). Her research focuses mainly on pointing gestures and their interaction with speech at the semantic-pragmatic interface, aiming at a more complete understanding of multimodal communication and a potential enrichment of linguistic models. She proposes to investigate this topic by adopting an experimental approach fed by sign language, semantic and pragmatic theories.
Selected publications
- Bonnet, M., Donati, C., & Geraci, C. (2022). Evidence for early lexical integration of speech and gestures. In NELS 52: Proceedings of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (Vol. 1, pp. 81-94).
- Schlenker, P., Bonnet, M., Lamberton, J., Lamberton, J., Chemla, E., Santoro, M., & Geraci, C. (2022). Iconic Syntax: Sign Language Classifier Predicates and Gesture Sequences. Linguistics and Philosophy.


Jana Bressem
(Associate Member)
TU Chemnitz
jana.bressem@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Jana Bressem is Post-Doc at the chair for German Linguistics, Semiotics and Multimodal Communication at the TU Chemnitz. She is the head of the center „Gesture Studies and Speech Sciences“, executive board member and project leader in the CRC 1410 “Hybrid Societies” in a project on “Intentionality and joint attention in multimodal interaction”. Jana Bressem received her PhD at the European University Viadrina in 2012 where she has also worked in various (interdisciplinary) research projects. She is interested in the multimodality of language (speech/gesture, text/image), typological gesture studies, language and cognition, pragmatics, and human-machine interaction.
Selected publications
- Bressem, J. (2015). Repetition als Mittel der Musterbildung bei redebegleitenden Gesten. In C. Dürscheid & J.G. Schneider (eds.), Satz, Äußerung, Schema (pp. 422-442). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, Jana (2021). Repetitions in gesture: A cognitive-linguistic and usage based perspective. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter: Mouton. Bressem, J., & Ladewig, S. H. (2011). Rethinking gesture phases: Articulatory features of gestural movement? Semiotica, 184(1/4), 53–91. doi:10.1515/semi.2011.022
- Bressem, J., Ladewig, S. H., & Müller, C. (2013). Linguistic annotation system for gestures (LASG). In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (eds.), Body-Language-Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.1.) (pp. 1098-1125). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, J., Stein, N., & Wegener, C. (2017). Multimodal language use in Savosavo: Refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture. Pragmatics, 27(2),173-206. doi:10.1075/prag.27.2.01bre
- Harrison, Simon, Silva H. Ladewig & Jana Bressem (eds.) (2021). The diversity of recurrency: Recurrent gesture cross-linguistically, Gesture 20:2 (Special Issue).


Ingmar Brilmayer
(Associate Member)
University of Cologne
ibrilmay@uni-koeln.de
Ingmar Brilmayer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the research project “Communication Electrified” (Volkswagenstiftung) with Prof. Petra Schumacher at the University of Cologne. Since 2020 he works on language in interaction and the integration of multimodal cues using combined EEG and eye tracking recordings with freely moving participants. Ingmar Brilmayer received his Bacherlor’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany), and his Master’s degree in Psycholinguistics, as well as his PhD at the University of Mainz (Mainz, Germany).
Selected publications
- Brilmayer, I., Werner, A., Primus, B., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., & Schlesewsky, M. (2019). The exceptional nature of the first person in natural story processing and the transfer of egocentricity. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(4), 411-427.
- Röhr, C. T., Brilmayer, I., Baumann, S., Grice, M., & Schumacher, P. B. (2021). Signal-driven and expectation-driven processing of accent types. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(1), 33-59.
- Brilmayer, I., & Schumacher, P. B. (2021). Referential chains reveal predictive processes and form-to-function mapping: An electroencephalographic study using naturalistic story stimuli. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 623648


Yuqiu Chen
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
yuqiu.chen@uni-goettingen.de
Yuqiu Chen is mainly interested in phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics interface and has worked, amongst others, on presuppositions, at-issueness, implicatures with a focus on their acquisition and cross-linguistic comparison. Recently, Yuqiu has defended her PhD thesis“Presuppositions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: Experimental Studies on Their Classification, Acquisition and Cross-Linguistic Comparison”. She will join the project “Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures?” as a post-doc in 2024.
Selected publications
- Yuqiu Chen, Maik Thalmann, Mailin Antomo (2022): “Presupposition triggers and (not-) at-issueness: Insights from language acquisition into the soft-hard distinction” In: Journal of Pragmatics (199), 21-46
- Yuqiu Chen (2022): “Wenn Nicht-Muttersprachler/innen mehr Toleranz zeigen: Eine experimentelle Studie zu Präsuppositionen, At-issueness und DaF”, In: Auteri, Laura et al. (Hrsg.): Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive (Bd. 6). Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik Beihefte, 213-227.
- Maik Thalmann, Yuqiu Chen, Susanne Müller, Markus Paluch, Mailin Antomo (2021): “Against PCI-GCI uniformity. Evidence from deceptive language in German and Chinese.” In: Linguistische Berichte, 235-285.
- Yuqiu Chen (2019): “An experimental study on scalar implicatures: Comparing German native speakers and Chinese learners of German.” In: Proceedings of ConSOLE XXVI, 116–138.


Pia Gehlbach
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
pia.gehlbach@uni-goettingen.de
Pia Gehlbach works on iconicity and semantic conceptualization in sign language with a focus on German Sign Language. She holds a B.A. in English Philology and General Linguistics and a M.A. in English with a linguistic focus, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen where she now works as a member of the Sign Language Lab at the Department of German Philology. She is a member of the RTG 2070 Understanding Social Relationships. In her PhD project, she investigates the influence of sign language iconicity on the semantic conceptualization of various types of concepts, combining corpus-data analysis with an experimental approach. Her project aims at providing a systematic overview of the iconicity of the investigated signs, as well as to examine if, and how, this iconicity has an impact on the way in which a concept is semantically conceptualized.


Jonas Hartke
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
jhartke@posteo.de
Jonas Hartke holds a B.A. in German Philology and Protestant Religion and a M.A. in German Philology, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. His main research interests are the semantics-pragmatics interface, gestures and pragmatic phenomena like irony and lies. At the moment he studies German Philology and Protestant Religion in the Master of Education.


Marianthi Koraka
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
marianthi.koraka@uni-goettingen.de
Marianthi works on sign languages and holds a special interest in the aspect of modality effects. She completed her BA and MA studies at the University of Ioannina, Greece and in her MA thesis she explored word order in GSL in simple declarative sentences and in wh-questions. In her PhD project, she investigates imperative speech acts in Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS) by using elicitation and judgement tasks. Through her project she aims to discover which strategies -morphosyntactic and prosodic- are employed in sign languages for the articulation of imperative speech acts and define the contribution of particular manual and non-manual elements. One of her research goals is to find whether sign languages possess a particular sentence type for the expression of directive constructions, similar to the one we call “Imperative” in spoken languages, and how it can be defined by applying specific diagnostics.


Matteo Maran
(Associate Member)
Donders Center for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen
matteo.maran@donders.ru.nl
Matteo Maran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Donders Center for Cognition (DCC) at Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). He is a member of the Speech Perception in Audiovisual Communication (SPEAC) research group, funded by the ERC Starting Grant ‘HearingHands’ (101040276; PI: Hans Rutger Bosker) that started in September 2022. He works on the audiovisual integration of gestural timing with spoken prosody in neurotypical and autistic individuals. Matteo Maran has a background in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and psycholinguistics, obtained during his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Padova (Padova, Italy) and his PhD project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany).
Selected publications
- Maran, M., Friederici, A. D., & Zaccarella, E. (2022). Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 142, 104881. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104881
- Maran, M., Numssen, O., Hartwigsen, G., & Zaccarella, E. (2022). Online neurostimulation of Broca’s area does not interfere with syntactic predictions: A combined TMS-EEG approach to basic linguistic combination. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 968836. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.968836
- Pyatigorskaya*, E., Maran*, M., & Zaccarella, E. (2023). Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2023.2173790
- Van Der Burght*, C. L., Friederici*, A. D., Maran*, M., Papitto*, G., Pyatigorskaya*, E., Schroen*, J., Trettenbrein*, P. C., & Zaccarella*, E. (2022). Cleaning up the Brickyard: How Theory and Methodology Shape Experiments in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6zpjq