Timo B. Roettger

I'm currently a PostDoc in ​Jennifer Cole's Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern.

​I'm a linguist with a focus on sound patterns of human language. My research interests centre around the question of how multi-dimensional, continuous aspects of speech can be related to discrete behavioural observations. I attempt to answer this question by investigating how communicative functions are phonetically encoded during speech production, how and when aspects of the speech signal are retrieved during speech perception, and how language users learn and generalise these patterns. 

​News

July 2018
New preprint discussing cross-linguistic correlations between segmental alternations and communicatively relevant intonational events [here]

New preprint presenting three experiments on American English, testing how well listeners can map prosody onto discourse functions [here]

March 2018
Preprint of Word final schwa epenthesis in Italian, accepted for publication in JASA [here]

New preprint discussing researcher degrees of freedom in phonetics [here]

Photo credit: Yang Li

​One common methodological theme that runs throughout my work is the critical assessment of experimental design and a strong commitment to quantitative methods, statistical models and open science.

Together with Harald Baayen and Bodo Winter, I also function as a guest editor for a special issue on "Emergent data analysis in phonetic sciences" to be published in Journal of Phonetics. After receiving over 30 proposals for the special issue authored by more than 80 scholars, we have invited eleven proposals to submit full papers. This surprisingly strong response is a reflection of our whole field asking and answering important questions regarding data analysis. Most papers of the special issue are now accepted or in press.

Together with Bodo Winter and Márton Sóskuthy,  I taught a summer school on "Statistics for Linguists" at the University of Birmingham in June 2018, which will be held again in 2019. 

Recently I approached and corresponded with the editorial boards of 80 linguistic journals, advocating for Registered Reports (RRs), a new article form that can drastically reduce common forms of bias in our scientific record. In response to my efforts, 12 journals already agreed to consider adding Registered Reports to their journal (Both "Journal of Language and Cognition" and "Language and Speech" agreed to implement RRs) and to remain in correspondence with me in order to discuss possible concerns. An updated list of journals and responses can be retrieved here.

I am a signatory on the Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative (PRO)

​Recently, I have started to teach work-shops on scientific communication with a particular focus on storytelling techniques, data visualisation, and slide design. I would like to invite the community to reconsider the way we communicate our scientific findings. I believe by doing so, we can increase our impact, bring our point more clearly across, and make the audience remember our research.

This is particularly relevant for inter-disciplinary fields such as the cognitive sciences. Clear and engaging communication can make our work more accessible to other scientific areas and allow us to reach out to the general audience.

Successful communication emotionally engages the audience via story telling techniques and the use of engaging and clear visualisations. Ideally, our message is tailored  to the audience's needs by considering both cognitive aspects of information processing and socio-scientific factors of communication practices.

I discuss related aspects of scientific communication in my blog.