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

January 2019
New open access article "Researcher degrees of freedom in phonetic research" published in Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association of Laboratory Phonology [link]

Our special issue on "Emergent data analysis in phonetic sciences" published at Journal of Phonetics is now complete [link]
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", published in Journal of Phonetics. All papers made their code and data available either via supplementary materials or third party repositories [link]

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.