Join Our Team: German-speaking Student Assistants Needed for the SoundStart project

You are warmly invited to apply for a student assistant position for about 4 hours of work per week for the Gesture to Sound study within the SoundStart project.

The SoundStart project explores prosodic development from prenatal stages to the third year of life. It focuses on two key aspects: Prosodic Phrasing, breaking speech into rhythmic and melodic units, and Prosodic Form-Meaning Mappings, linking intonation patterns with meanings. Investigating Biologically Motivated Mechanisms, Input-Based Learning in the Auditory Modality, and the role of the Visual Modality, the project aims to unveil how infants learn the aspects of their native language’s melody and rhythm.

Within the Gesture to Sound study, we seek to uncover the significance of infant-directed gestures in language development. Infants learn language by breaking down continuous speech into meaningful units like sentences and words through interactions with caregivers, who often speak slower and use exaggerated gestures. While the impact of speech on language development is understood, the role of gestures remains unclear.

We are currently seeking a German-speaking BA/MA student who can contribute to our interactive foreign language learning study with infants, focusing on the impact of visual cues on language development.

As a member of our team, your tasks will primarily involve interacting in German with 8-9-month-old Dutch-learning infants individually or in small groups for 12 sessions over a period of three or four months. Each session can last about 20 minutes. You will receive prior training for these interactions, which will take place in both lab settings and at the infants’ homes or daycare centers. As secondary tasks, you will assist in data annotation and communication with participating families.

Gross salary:

Depends on assistant’s educational level and ranges from €240 to €261 for a 0.1 FTE appointment.

Expected start date:

Preferably 1 June 2024 but it is negotiable.

How to apply:

Please feel free to contact Victoria Reshetnikova (Gesture to Sound PhD student) at v.reshetnikova@uu.nl for further information.

Please send your CV and a motivation letter to v.reshetnikova@uu.nl by noon May 15th.