The PhD Network aims at forming a community between ViCom early career researchers. Our PhD contact persons, Alina Gregori & Šárka Kadavá, are available for communication between PhDs and ViCom. They are also contact persons for external people, e.g. external PhD students, and help organize PhD events.
PhD Contact Persons


Alina Gregori
(Steering Committee Member, PhD Candidate, PhD Contact Person)
Project:
Co-speech Gestures and Prosody as
Multimodal Markers of Information Structure
Goethe University Frankfurt
gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Alina Gregori received her Bachelors (2021) and Masters (2022) degree in theoretical linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt with a focus on Phonology. She started working as a PhD student in the project MultIS in October 2022. Within the project, she investigates the prosody-gesture link in communication and the impact of information structure (focus, topic, givenness) on the synchronization of gestures and prosodic entities in German. The bigger picture of the project includes a comparative analysis of German and Catalan with regard to the multimodal marking of information structure. A central aim in MultIS is the empirical approach to previously established prosody-gesture models, considering experimental as well as spontaneous speech utterances. Alina Gregoris MA thesis (title: “Co-speech Gestures, Information Structure and Prosody: A Corpus Study on Prominence Peak Alignment”) served as a pilot and preparation for MultIS.
Selected publications
- Gregori, Alina & Kügler, Frank (2022). An Empirical Investigation on the Perceptual Similarity of Prosodic Language Types. In Proc. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 209-213, doi: 10.21437/TAI.2021-43.


Šárka Kadavá
(PhD Candidate, PhD Contact Person)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
kadava@leibniz-zas.de
Šárka Kadavá is a doctoral researcher in the DFG project On the FLExibility and Stability of gesture-speecH coordination (FLESH): Evidence from production, comprehension, and imitation. She is currently based in Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. Her research focuses on multimodality, on how different modalities contribute to the sharing of meaning and how they are coordinated with each other, and on how language-like structural features emerge in non-normative communication systems. She has also participated in a project developing Czech adaptation of MB-CDI at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences.