Gerrit Kentner
I have moved to Frankfurt -
you can find me here
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welcome...
I am a research associate in the project "Prosody in Parsing"
at the Department of Linguistics
at Potsdam University,
currently pursuing a PhD on the role of prosodic phonological processes in human sentence production and comprehension.
Before that, I completed professional education as a speech and language therapist in Münster
and went on studying general linguistics with an emphasis on neuro- and psycholinguistics and speech pathology at Potsdam University.
In 2004-2005, I spent a year as an exchange student and research intern in Newcastle upon Tyne/ UK.
There, in Kai Alter's lab
at the Institute of Neuroscience, I started my master's thesis
on the role of prosody for processing elliptic sentences in English which I completed back in Potsdam in January 2006.
My research interests are centred around the role of prosody in phonological theory and in human sentence processing.
This involves the investigation of both speech production and perception.
I am especially interested in how prosodic phrasing and linguistic rhythm influence sentence comprehension
and how implicit or "silent" prosody affect the parsing process in reading.
To this end, I am currently comparing timing patterns from eye-tracking data with speech production data.
teaching
- Summer term 2008: Rhythmusphonologie; Uni Potsdam
- Winter term 2008-2009 (mit Caroline Féry): Prosodie in der Satzverarbeitung; Uni Potsdam
- Féry, C. and Kentner, G. (submitted). The prosody of grouping names in German and Hindi.
- Umesh Patil, Gerrit Kentner, Anja Gollrad, Frank Kügler, Caroline Féry and Shravan Vasishth (2008). Focus, word order, and intonation in Hindi. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 1, 53-70.
- Kentner, G., Féry, C., and Alter, K. (2008). Prosody in Speech Production and Perception: The Case of Right Node Raising in English. In A. Steube (Ed.), The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures: Event Structures and Information Structures. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Kentner, G. (2007). Prosodic Phrasing in Elliptic and Non-elliptic Coordinations. Proceedings of the XVI. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences; Saarbrücken.
- Kentner, G. (2007). Length, Ordering Preference and Intonational Phrasing: Evidence from Pauses. Proceedings of Interspeech 2007; Antwerp.
- Otten, G. Die Rolle der Prosodie bei der Verarbeitung elliptischer Strukturen im Englischen. Diplomarbeit Universität Potsdam.
I have advised the authors of the following study on statistical data analysis:
- 05 March 2009: "Rhythm is crucial for incremental structure building in reading"; Invited talk at
31st annual meeting of the linguistics association of Germany (DGfS), Osnabrück.
- 02 March 2009: "Rhythmic contraints on the realization of contrastive accents in reading"; Talk at
P&P5, Köln.
- 01 March 2009: "Prosodic Disambiguation in German and Hindi"; joint presentation of "Prosody in Parsing" project with Frank Kügler at
third annual meeting of SPP 1234, Köln.
- 06 January 2009: "Implicit rhythm affects parsing decisions in reading";
Talk at Experimental Studies on Intonation, Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University.
- 06 January 2009: "Prosody and Pragmatics in processing negative scope ambiguities";
Poster at Experimental Studies on Intonation, Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University.
- 06 June 2008: "Prosodic Minimalism in processing written sentences";
Talk at first Potsdam-Lund-Prosody-Meeting, Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University.
- 24 April 2008: "Linguistic Rhythm affects incremental sentence processing in reading"; Talk at Phonology Colloquium, Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University.
[slides]
- 11 April 2008: "Influence of rhythmic structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in reading aloud"; Poster presentation at Prosody08 - Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody; Cornell University. [Poster]
- 07 October 2007: "Prosody in Parsing Hindi"; Talk with Anja Gollrad at second annual meeting of priority programme 1234; Nijmegen.
- 31 August 2007: "Length, Ordering Preference and Intonational Phrasing". Poster presentation at Interspeech 2007; Antwerp. [Poster]
- 07 August 2007: "Prosodic Phrasing in Elliptic and Non-Elliptic Coordinations". Poster presentation at the International Conference of Phonetic Sciences; Saarbrücken. [Poster]
- 11 October 2006: Presentation of "Prosody in Parsing" project with Frank Kügler at first annual meeting of priority programme 1234; Stuttgart.
- August 2005: Talk on "Prosody in Elliptic Constructions" at colloquium of Newcastle Auditory Lab Group; Newcastle upon Tyne.
last updated 08 January 2009