Matthias Sjerps

I am currently working as a Postdoc in the Individual Differences group. I will be working on the allocation of cognitive resources in dialog. A central question in this research is: why does turn taking proceed relatively smoothly most of the time? I hope to uncover how participants dynamically allocate their resources during turn-taking.

During my PhD project I was working on human speech perception. I have been looking at a specific mechanism termed "extrinsic vowel normalization": Listeners interpret a speech sound relative to the speaker that uttered that sound. Listeners do so by taking into account the general voice characteristics of a speaker. I investigated how and when this compensation mechanism works, and whether it is specific to the processing of speech sounds.