Skip to main content
Human-Robot Interaction Lab Sønderborg

Activities

April 2020

In the framework of the annual Sonderborg research festival, Maria Alm and Kerstin Fischer contribute with a talk open to the public on intonation, explaining how German and Danish participants in a study reacted to native speaker utterances with intonation from the other language. The talk is also presented in writing in the brochure Forskningskanonen (“the research gun”, in Danish only; read it here on the webpage for Forskningskanonen).

December 2019

Nathalie Schümchen gives a workshop on visual note-taking, an approach which makes use of the conscious use of graphic elements during note-taking, at the EMCA (Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis) boot camp in Skåstrup Strand, Denmark. 

Nathalie Schümchen successfully defends her PhD thesis How do learners make use of foreign language learning material? A micro-analytical study to support the evaluation and development of visual learning instructions at the Department of Design and Communication at SDU, Kolding. Find the dissertation at the SDU library here

Kerstin Fischer, Oliver Niebuhr, Rosalyn M. Langedijk and Selina Eisenberger present joint work in the talk I shall know you by your voice – Melodic and physical dominance in the design of robot voices at the SEFOS 1. International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech – Breathing, Pausing, and Voice at SDU Sonderborg.

Photo_SEFOS_2019_Langedejk_Eisenberger_talk

Also at the SEFOS Seminar, Kerstin Fischer and Nathalie Schümchen present a paper on the effect of the position of hesitation markers on comprehension (read the paper here). Maria Alm presents the poster Final lengthening in Danish (see the poster here) and Nathalie Schümchen presents a poster about Teaching Strategic Use of Hesitation Markers.

October 2019

Kerstin Fischer is invited keynote speaker at the Conference by the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics with a talk on Doing Linguistics Using Robots.

September 2019

At the Interspeech conference (Interspeech 2019) in Graz, Austria, Oliver Niebuhr presents joint work with Kerstin Fischer on hesitation markers and when they become disturbing or annoying: Do not hesitate! Unless you do it shortly or nasally: How the phonetics of filled pauses determine their subjective frequency and perceived speaker performance. See the poster here

 

August 2019

Maria Alm presents joint work by Oliver Niebuhr, Nathalie Schümchen, Maria Alm, and Kerstin Fischer in the talk Developing a Visualization Strategy for Teaching Intonationat The 29th conference of the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA 29) at Lund University, Sweden.

June 2019

Kerstin Fischer and Oliver Niebuhr co-organize a panel on "What Influences Influence: What makes utterances persuasive?" at the 16th International Conference of Pragmatics in Hong Kong, together with Jaap Ham (TU Eindhoven) and Annette Leßmöllmann (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). In this panel, Rosalyn M. Langedijk presents "Personalization of social proof in a health-related context" in which she reports on the effects of single persuasive utterances on interaction. Kerstin Fischer reports on human-robot interaction experiments in which she and Lars C. Jensen tested the effects of referring to the shared context on the persuasiveness of utterances. Oliver Niebuhr presents results on the effects of charismatic speech.

Søren Wind Eskildsen organizes the panel Embodied L2 interactional competence and its development on an invitation from the organisors of the second international conference on interactional competences and practices in a second language (ICOP‐L2) at Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden. At this panel, he also presents a paper on the same topic.

At the 4th international conference Thinking, Doing, Learning, in University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Søren Wind Eskildsen presents the talk Building a semiotic repertoire for social action: Towards an interactional usage‐based approach to L2 research.

May 2019

Søren Wind Eskildsen gives a keynote talk on the development of verbal constructions as an interactional competence in second-language learning at the 14th conference on the Scandinavian languages as second and foreign languages (NordAnd 14) in Copenhagen.

Also at NordAnd, Maria Alm presents the poster Formal Germans and dominant Danes – why you should teach intonation by Kerstin Fischer, Oliver Niebuhr , and Maria Alm. See the poster here

Nathalie Schümchen presents the talk Building up interactional competence through collaborative sense-making: Using embodied resources to understand German intonation at The International Conference on Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language (ICOP-L2) at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden.

April 2019

In the framework of the annual Sonderborg research festival, Kerstin Fischer and Maria Alm contribute with a talk open to the public on modal particles, giving a construction-grammatical suggestion for how to teach such “unobtrusive small words” that nonetheless make an important contribution. The talk is also presented in writing in the brochure Forskningskanonen (“the research gun”, in Danish only). See the brochure here (in Danish)

March 2019

Kerstin Fischer presents the results of Experiments on intercultural differences in the delivery of bad news and on the effects of prosodic lengthening of greetings (joint work with Malte Jung, Lars C. Jensen and Maria aus der Wieschen) at the Human-Robot Interaction Conference in Daegu, Korea.

Kerstin Fischer delivers a keynote lecture in a workshop on Expressivity and Longterm Engagement at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Daegu, Korea.

February 2019

Maria Alm presents research from the project at SDU’s event ”Study Try Out” for incoming students at Campus Sonderborg. She presents two studies on intercultural communication, one of native speakers’ reactions to speakers using non-native intonation and one of people’s reactions to culturally diverse strategies in delivering bad news.

January 2019

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk Using Robots to Study Speech and Interaction at the University of Valencia, Spain.

November 2018

Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen and Nathalie Schümchen present Teaching 'English melody' in Danish primary schools at the Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction (NorDisCo) at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Martin J. Eppler and Nathalie Schümchen present An Analysis of the Impact of Practical Metadiscoursive Nudges on Conversation Behavior in Idea Evaluation Discussions at the Nordic Interdisciplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction (NorDisCo) at Aarhus University, Denmark.

September 2018

Maria Alm presents joint work with Kerstin Fischer on A construction grammatical approach to teaching modal particles to L2 learners at the 8thconference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association in Koblenz, Germany. Download the program and the abstracts from the conference homepage

August 2018

Nathalie Schümchen and Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen present Moving in and out of being '“on record” by gavelingat the International Conference on Multimodality (9ICOM), University of Southern Denmark, Odense

July 2018

Nathalie Schümchen and Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen present Degrees of Embodiment in Collaborative Sense-Making of Different Types of Visual Teaching Materials at The International Conference of Conversation Analysis (ICCA-18), Loughborough University, UK.

Kerstin Fischer presents her and Oliver Niebuhr’s joint work on Two different types of prosody-pragmatics pairs with framing functions at The 10th International Construction Grammar Conference (ICCG10) in Paris, France.

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk Mit Robotern sprechen (“Talking with robots”) at Kiel University, Germany. Watch a video of this presentation here and take a look at the program on the homepage of the lecture series (in German).

June 2018

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk A Construction Grammatical Model of German Modal Particles for Second Language Teaching at the workshop Constructions: Theoretical, Typological and Applied Perspectives at the University of Copenhagen. 

May 2018

Nathalie Schümchen spends part of her Ph.D. time at the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, where she discusses her work with the colleagues and continues working on her PhD project.

April 2018

In the framework of Forskningsdøgn, Kerstin Fischer gives a talk on Getting into the Heads of People Using Robots to students of the Sonderborg secondary school Statsskolen.

Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen presents A Social Media Approach to Increasing Intercultural Competence in the Border Region to students of the Business College Syd, Sonderborg.

March 2018

Kerstin Fischer visits Stanford University for six weeks to collaborate with Herbert H. Clark, Yoshiko Matsumoto and others on robots as social actors and the use of robots for pragmatics research.

Søren Wind Eskildsen presents Yes but…: Learning to agree and disagree in L2 talk  at The 2018 Conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL 2018) in Chicago, Illinois, US.

Nathalie Schümchen spends part of her PhD time at the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where she discusses her work with the colleagues and continues working on her PhD project.

February 2018

Nathalie Schümchen spends part of her PhD time at the Visual Studies and Learning Design (ViLD) Research Center at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, where she discusses her work with the colleagues and continues working on her PhD project.

January 2018

Nathalie Schümchen visits the University of Bielefeld, Germany, where she among other things organizes a workshop on the incorporation of visualizations in university teaching and other areas of academic work.

December 2017

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk Using Robots to Study Interaction at the EMCA (Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis) PhD Bootcamp in Middelfart, Denmark.

July 2017

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk Using Robots to Study Interaction at the EMCA (Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis) PhD Bootcamp in Middelfart, Denmark.

Søren Wind Eskildsen participates in the panel Exploiting the wild for L2 learning and teaching at The 18th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA 2017) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

June 2017

Kerstin Fischer presents a keynote lecture and a highlight workshop on Using robots to study speech in the framework of The 8th Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics (ExLing 2017) in Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

April 2017

Søren Wind Eskildsen participates in the panel What counts as evidence for L2 learning? – A conversation-analytic perspective at The 3rd International Conference on Usage-Based Perspectives on L2 learning: Thinking, Doing, Learning, at the University of Munich, Germany.

March 2017

Nathalie Schümchen presents the talk Foreign Accent in the Acoustic Features of Speech Melody – A Danish-German Case Study on the design and first results from a study done by Maria Alm, Kerstin Fischer, Lars C. Jensen, Oliver Niebuhr, and Nathalie Schümchen at the annual meeting of the German Acoustical Society (DAGA) in Kiel, Germany.

February 2017

Kerstin Fischer and Nathalie Schümchen present the talk Between Pragmatic Function and Bad Reputation: Partner Models Mediate the Use and Interpretation of Hesitation Markers at the Disfluency Conference, Louvain La Neuve, Belgium.

Kerstin Fischer presents the talk Using Robots to Study Speech at the Study-Try-Out at the University of Southern Denmark, Sonderborg.

January 2017  

Søren Wind Eskildsen presents the keynote talk From form-meaning pairings to action-construction pairings: The mutually constitutive nature of linguistic constructions and social action in L2 talk at the conference Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

November 2016

Kerstin Fischer presents a talk at the Program Committee Meeting of the HRI Conference at the University of Munich, Germany, on How robots profit from speaking like Steve Jobs.

October 2016

Kerstin Fischer and the research team organize a theme session for the 7th conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association on Using Cognitive Linguistics for Teaching Elusive Language Phenomena. In this panel, Kerstin Fischer, Maria Alm, Oliver Niebuhr, Søren Wind Eskildsen, and Nathalie Schümchen present the joint talk First steps into teaching intonation.

August 2016

Søren Wind Eskildsen gives a keynote talk An inventory of constructions or interactional competence? Evidence for L2 learning from a usage‐based perspective at the EuroSLA 2016 Conference in Jyväskylä, Finland.

Also at the EuroSLA, Søren Wind Eskildsen presents a paper on L2 grammar-for-interaction: developmental trajectory of English ’I don’t know’ at the EuroSLA 2016 Conference in Jyväskylä, Finland.

June 2016

Kerstin Fischer participates in a panel discussion at the UK Robotics Week at Plymouth University, UK.

April 2016

Nathalie Schümchen presents a poster about the visualization of prosodic contours and teaching prosody at the Research Day event (“Forskningens Døgn”) at SDU, Sonderborg.

Lars Christian Jensen presents a poster about How to use robots in foreign language teaching at the Research Day event (“Forskningens Døgn”) at SDU, Sonderborg.

March 2016

Lars Christian Jensen talked about first results on the Communicative functions of duration in greetings on Danish radio P1 and P4 (in Danish only).  

January 2016

A short description of the project is published on SDU’s homepage.

Results from the first experiment on the role of duration in greetings are presented as a video during the MCI Spring Reception.

December 2015

Maria Alm presents a talk on Intonation and second language teaching at a workshop on construction grammar in Bergen, Norway. 

November 2015

Maria Alm presents a talk on the role of intonation in grammatical description and teaching in Lund, Sweden. First experiment about different visualitation techniques for intonation contours.

October 2015

First HRI experiment on the role of duration in greetings.


Last Updated 10.02.2023