LOT Lab Rotations

gain additional research experience by visiting a lab or research group

Gain research experience in a lab or research group at a university other than your own

LOT Lab Rotations offer RM students the possibility to gain research experience in a lab or research group at a university other than their own, and thus broaden their view on research practices. Students can gain 5 LOT credits in one lab rotation. Travel costs are covered by LOT for those students that do not have a public transport card already.

Students become external participants in a research environment at a LOT affiliated research institute in The Netherlands, become familiarised with the research being done in that group, and carry out a small project under the supervision of one or more senior researchers within that group.

Students interested in participating in this national exchange scheme should first contact their RM coordinator to discuss the desirability and feasibility of choosing this option, and then contact the coordinator of the lab or research group they want to visit to set up a plan, which should be approved by the RM coordinator. After the lab rotation the student writes a report. Once this report has been approved by the RM coordinator after consulting with the coordinator of the lab or research group that was visited, LOT is informed of the outcome of the lab rotation and provides a certificate to the student.

Labs and research groups currently available to receive students from other universities are the following:

ACLC – University of Amsterdam

Mapping multilinguality in Amsterdam (contact Eva van Lier)

DeepFon (contact Paul Boersma)

Empirical Foundations of Phonology – (contact Silke Hamann)

Language Learning, Literacy and Multilingualism (contact Sible Andringa)

SignLab (contact Roland Pfau)

Multicue (contact Josje Verhagen )

Language and Cognition in Argumentation (contact Jean Wagemans )

CLCG – University of Groningen

Computational Semantics (contact Johan Bos)

Bilingualism and Aging Lab (contact Merel Keijzer)

Language and Social Interaction (contact Tom Koole)

Semantics and Cognition (contact Petra Hendriks)

Language Technology (contact Gertjan van Noord)

First Language Acquisition (contact Angeliek van Hout)

Speech Lab (contact Martijn Wieling)

CLS – Radboud University Nijmegen

Cognitive and Developmental Aspects of Multilingualism (contact Sharon Unsworth)

Discourse and Pragmatics (contact Margot van Mulken)

First Language Acquistion (contact Paula Fikkert)

Grammar & Cognition (contact Helen de Hoop)

Speech Production and Comprehension (contact Esther Janse)

Language and Speech, Learning and Therapy (contact Catia Cucchiarini)

Language and Speech Technology (contact Nelleke Oostdijk)

Non-nativeness in Communication (contact Jos Hornikx)

Language and Communication Effects (contact Enny Das )

Language Learning, Teaching and Testing (contact Marc van Oostendorp )

Language and Social Interaction (contact Mark Dingemanse)

Language Variation in 4D (contact Janine Berns )

LUCL – Leiden University

Babylab (contact Claartje Levelt )

Phonetics (contact Yiya Chen)

Language Processing (contact Leticia Pablos or Stan van der Burght )

Meertens Institute Amsterdam

Various options (contact Marc van Oostendorp)

VU University Amsterdam

Computational Linguistics (contact Piek Vossen)

Tilburg University

Experience matters: unlocking and improving image description guidelines through participatory design

Researcher: Emiel van Miltenburg

This project aims to develop, evaluate, and publish guidelines for making images more accessible for people with visual impairments through image descriptions. While the scientific literature on this topic is surprisingly scarce, accessibility organizations already have experience in providing descriptions for different kinds of images to benefit different kinds of users. We wish to open up this institutional knowledge, and study how current image description practices, mostly focusing on highly pragmatic image descriptions, can be improved. We do this through a participatory design approach in which people with visual impairments and image describers are actively involved. We currently have a couple of concrete projects that students could contribute to, including an assessment of the image description capabilities of large language models, and a survey study among image describers asking about the challenges they face when describing images for visually impaired users. For a smaller internship, students could contribute to a qualitative analysis of interview data for which transcripts are already available.

Exploring effective intervention strategies in chatbot-assisted limit setting in online gambling

Researchers: Christine Liebrecht & Loes Janssen

Dutch online gambling providers are obliged to monitor and support their customers to prevent gambling addiction. It is challenging, however, to steer customers’ behavior without activating feelings of resistance. With online gambling provider TOTO we are developing and testing the effectiveness of a conversational agent (chatbot, CA) assisting players in limit-setting before online play. In this project, we are interested in the effectiveness of intervention strategies provided by the conversational agent to assist gambler in setting their limits to avoid irresponsible behavior.

Lab Rotation at the Visual Language Lab

Researcher: Neil Cohn (www.visuallanguagelab.com)

The Visual Language Lab investigates the cognition of graphic communication in relation to, and in combination with, language. Our research includes both behavioral and neurocognitive (EEG) research, as well as corpus analysis of visual media. Our current work focuses on the TINTIN Project (www.visuallanguagelab.com/tintin), where we are building a corpus by annotating the linguistic structures in 1,000+ comics from 144 countries around the world. We are asking: 1) Are there cross-cultural patterns that across different “visual languages” used in comics of the world? 2) Do these cross-cultural differences reflect patterns in the spoken languages of the comics creators? Topic areas include emotion, events, multimodality, perspective taking, visual composition, gender, and more.

Conversational Agent Voting Advice Applications (CAVAAs)

Researchers: Naomi Kamoen & Christine Liebrecht

In election times, millions of voters consult Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), such as the Dutch Stemwijzer, to learn more about political parties and their standpoints. While VAAs have been shown to enhance political knowledge and increase electoral turnout, research demonstrates at the same time that voters frequently experience comprehension problems when responding to the political attitude statements in a VAA.

To help users to better understand attitude statements in a VAA, and consequently, to be better informed about the political issues at stake, we are currently exploring the possibility of implementing a Conversational Agent (chatbot) into a VAA; users can ask questions to the chatbot about the political issues in the VAA and the tool provides a tailored answer in return. Our first studies show that these so-called CAVAAs (which is the abbreviation of Conversation Agent Voting Advice Applications) are promising tools to enhance users’ political knowledge, but there is plenty of room for further investigation.

In this lab rotation project, we will further explore the uses and effects of CAVAAs, but this time during the European Elections of June 6, 2024. You will be collaborating with us (Naomi & Christine) in running an experimental and/ or non-experimental study during these elections. You can help developing experimental materials (CAVAAs!), run the study (in the wild and/ or in the lab) and analyze the data. It is helpful if you have good knowledge of Dutch.

Trend research on brand communication

Researcher: Joost Verhoeven

The profession of communication and branding is always under development. For professionals and researchers, it is sometimes hard to oversee the latest technological developments, or to understand which ideas are currently being adopted in the workplace. To help professionals navigate these developments, and to set up a research agenda for future years, we have aim to describe the most important trends in the professional field. To do so, we teamed up with SWOCC (swocc.nl): a network of branding professionals and branding researchers, that aims to bridge the gap between science and practice. SWOCC initiates research projects, shares knowledge in all kinds of ways, organizes events, and will now also publish a trend report.

This report will be based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research among branding professionals. The study design is based on a Delphi method: first, a group of 6 SWOCC members will conduct interviews with branding professionals about the signals that suggest certain trends. In a second research phase, the same sample of brand professionals will fill out a questionnaire about the trends that will be distracted from the first phase.

As a researcher, you will be involved in all phases of the project: you will analyze qualitative interview data, develop the online questionnaire, and analyze that data as well. In between, we will meet several times with the research team to discuss the meaning of the data.

‘This’ and ‘that’ in different languages

Researcher: David Peeters

Over the past year, two lab rotation students have investigated whether the choice of a writer to use the word this versus the word that in their text is actually influenced by the genre of the text – think about writing to a friend versus writing to an insurance company. We jointly set up an online experiment and looked at the use of participants’ demonstratives (words like this, that, here, and there) across different text genres and in different languages. This initial study was carried out in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese.

Over the coming months, we hope to replicate this study in languages other than Dutch and Mandarin. As a student, you can join the process of setting up the online experiment for a language of your liking, help in collecting and (linguistically and/or statistically) analyzing the data, and gain experience in writing a paper together. You’re welcome to join all stages of this empirical cycle, but of course also develop your own ideas, and contribute as a co-author to a resulting paper. The main goal of the lab rotation would be for you to learn something you find useful on a topic that interests you. An interest in pragmatics and/or multimodal communication, from a linguistic or psycholinguistic perspective, would make a good match.

What does peace mean to you? Join our cross-national survey study and content analysis project on peace drawings!

Researcher: Dagmar Punter

Just as the daily news logically pulls our attention to war and violent conflict, research too predominantly focuses on the causes and impact of war. Less is known about the meaning of and conditions for peace. What kind of peace do we imagine after conflict, how do we describe peace when it is there, and can both exist at the same time? How do ‘ordinary’ people describe, communicate, and visualize peace? What factors determine people’s perceptions of this abstract concept? Do we see differences between people’s perceptions in countries that are culturally different and have different histories of war and peace? And if we would ask you to draw what a situation of peace may look like, what would you sketch?

These are some of the questions you are invited to work on in this Lab Rotation. You will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of researchers (Dagmar Punter, prof. dr. Juliëtte Schaafsma and dr. Jan Engelen) on the data collection and analysis of large-scale cross-national survey conducted in 12 different countries and the content analysis of peace drawings collected at a large public science festival. The Lab Rotation is connected to the PhD research of Dagmar Punter who studies the everyday meaning of peace through a multi-method approach. In this Lab Rotation, you will gain in-depth knowledge of cross-national survey research and the content analysis of both visual and textual representations of peace. We are looking for students who have an interest in this highly societal relevant theme and the described research methods.

Development of intonation manipulation methods

Researcher: Tom Lentz

Intonation is a subfield of prosody, concerned with the use of variations in pitch, duration, spectral quality and loudness to add something to a sentence. For instance, a phrase can be marked as new information to the listener, as in “MARY did not go the the party” vs Mary did not go to the PARTY” (this is called information structure). Another example is the expression of stance; an utterance can be pronounced as an exclamation, expressing surprise, or with ironic intonation, exrpessing the speakers stance towards the content. For your lab rotation, you will work on the development of manipulations of intonation (mainly pitch) to make an utterance be perceived as having another stance or focus. For instance, we are looking for a way to make sentences sound more pragmatic (based on previous findings, if pitch variation is constant throughout a sentence it sounds ironic or satirical). Another possibility is to further develop a way to manipulate the intonation of a key word expressing a risk (such as ‘likely’) to see if listeners’ interpretation of the risk changes. The reason that we want to have such manipulations is to be able to finetune theories on intonation and to be able to empirically test them (e.g., by presenting two versions of the same utterance to participants in an experiment and ask how they perceive the speaker’s stance).

Interpretability of deep learning networks for speech

Researcher: Tom Lentz

Speech used to be hard to process for artificial intelligence, but with the development of (largely unsupervised) end-to-end speech models such as Wav2Vec and Whisper, we know a lot of the internal structure of speech can be represented by (in) deep neural networks (DNNs). However, we do not know how; DNNs are like black boxes due to their sheer size and complexity. The InDeep consortium of Dutch universities and industry works on providing interpretation (or explainability) of speech DNNs. In this lab rotation, you will contribute to this by formalizing classic s(human) peech perception experiments and make DNNs also do them, so their behavior can be compared to human behavior. If you also happen to have technical skills, you can also test if the representations that humans are hypothesized to have are also present in a DNN. The goal is to further understand DNNs and to be able to test if DNNs process speech in the same (reliable) way for different speakers and in different circumstances. Knowing whether this is the case allows users of DNNs to have more control over their interaction with speech technology and can foster inclusivity and ensure AI contributes positively to society.

The uncanny valley effect for prosody/speech

Researcher: Tom Lentz

Humans find humanlikeness in artificial things pleasant, but some artefacts that are not completely human but close to humans are scary (e.g., clowns and dolls). This effect is called the Uncanny Valley Effect (UVE). This effect is hypothesized to exist for synthetic speech, but showing this conclusively has eluded our lab. In other words, we are on the hunt for this effect, after we have glimpsed traces of it in previous experiments. In this lab rotation, you will contribute by trying to find why only a subset of listeners experiences the UVE for near-human speech, by identifying possibly reasons some participants experience the UVE while others do not. Additionally or alternatively, you can work on developing new ways to manipulate speech to make it sound uncanny (see also Lab rotation 1: Development of intonation manipulation methods).

Connections that Matter: The Digital Lives of Older Adults

Researchers: Will Marler & Carla Roos

Ever wondered what the digital age looks like from the perspective of an older adult? Do you want to sharpen your skills in qualitative research? This project is for you! In this study (“Connections that Matter: The Digital Lives of Older Adults”) we explore how people aged 65 to 80 use the internet and social media to stay connected to loved ones and make their voices heard in society, taking a look at differences across the US and Netherlands. We have just completed 30 in-depth interviews with American and Dutch older adults and are excited to analyze our transcripts. That is where you come in! We invite you to join our research team as an intern assisting with our qualitative data analysis. Experience with ATLAS.ti is a plus, but not required (quick learners can learn this on the job and have a new skill for their CV!). Qualitative coding involves reading transcripts and uncovering themes across interviews. Lower-level themes (e.g., “feeling lonely” or “learning by doing”) build into higher level themes (e.g., “digital adapting in older age”) through multiple readings and conversations with your co-researchers. This is the “magic” (science) of the in-depth, qualitative approach that you will learn during the internship. In addition to assisting with coding, we are interested in someone with attention to detail and good organizational skills who can assist us with related analysis tasks, such as reviewing transcripts for accuracy. We hope you take an interest in our project and look forward to meeting you!

Designing digital nudge interventions to promote healthy food choices across the lower SEP gradient

Researcher: Nadine van der Waal

The digital transformation of the food environment presents both opportunities and threats regarding responsible consumption, particularly for promoting healthy food choices. The DIGIQUITY4HEALTH project aims to investigate the impact of digital choice environments on healthy food choices across different socioeconomic positions (SEP) and explore ways to ensure that digitalization promotes health equity. More specifically, we aim to look at the effect of just-in-time nudges, which are prompts that are delivered at the right moment to influence behaviour or decision-making. The term comes from the idea that the nudge occurs precisely when it is most relevant or beneficial for the individual. For example, this might occur when you’re choosing a particular product while buying groceries in an online supermarket, by means of a pop-up suggesting an alternative product.

Within the research group, a post-doc researcher and two PhD-researchers work closely together, guided by senior researchers. We are now in the phase of setting up several projects, which you could be joining as a research master student. In a large-scale cross-sectional study, we seek to understand why those with lower SEP tend to have lower healthy eating intentions, and whether they would respond differently to a nudge intervention than those with higher SEP. In a series of experimental studies, we look into several predictors of nudge effectiveness, for example personalization, nudge transparency, and nudge source. Lastly, a project involves the setup of a lower SEP advisory group, where we aim to increase the accessibility for researchers to include this group in research.

In short, there is a broad variety of tasks that you could work on, depending on your interest:

– Assist with reviewing the literature

– Assist in conducting qualitative research, such as focus groups

– Assist in the set-up of a large scale survey (e.g., operationalizing variables, programming survey)

– Assist in the planning and execution of experimental studies, focusing on aspects like recruiting participants or data collection.

– Work on specific aspects of data analysis, such as cleaning and organising data collected.

Center for Social Influence – Content and consequences of online influencer communication

Researcher: Alexander Schouten

The Center for Social Influence is an informal group of about 10 researchers who study the social and societal consequences of social media communication. We are located within the department of Communication & Cognition, Tilburg University.

Our current research revolves around three main topics. First, we study how social influencers may be used to promote healthy behavior, such as healthy eating. Second, we study how influencers may affect people’s self-esteem and well-being. Third, we study the underlying processes that make influencers successful promotors.

We are currently working on and starting up several projects that you could join as a research master student. First, influencers are powerful persuaders, but sometimes often, what they say carries little truth. There is much misinformation about politics, health claims, etc. In this project, we want to study how influencers contribute to the spread of misinformation and investigate possible solutions to counter this. Second, we want to study the domain of virtual influencers. These are AI-generated influencers based on generated images, text, and voice. They are hugely popular, but little is known about how people interact and are affected by these influencers. Can they take the role of a friend or even a lover? Third, we want to continue investigating how influencers affect people’s mental and physical health. We are preparing a systematic review of empirical research on social media influencers and health communication.

As a research master student, you can work with us on these existing topics, or develop your own topic within our center.

Does emotional crying also impact others via chemosignalling?

Researcher: Ad Vingerhoets

There is increasing evidence that the primary function of crying should not be searched for in the intra-personal domain (the notion that crying brings relief via catharsis), but rather in the inter-personal domain. The sound of crying (especially of infants and children) significantly affects others, and so does the sight of emotional tears. Exposure to emotional tears enhances empathic abilities and elicits support and comfort behaviors in others. Recently, it has been suggested that there is an additional modality via which tearful crying might impact others. As has been demonstrated in other animals, it is speculated that human tears may also contain certain substances (“pheromones”) that might influence conspecifics’ behavior and physiological processes. More specifically, that substance is hypothesized to decrease testosterone levels in men, resulting in decreased sexual interest and diminished aggression and proneness to display violence. It is the latter that we want to replicate and extend.

In summary, such a double-blind study includes harvesting fresh emotional tears and exposing study participants to these tears or saline (the control condition). After that, the participants undergo valid aggression tests. Those exposed to the tears are expected to show less aggression than those exposed to the saline.

Multimodal child-directed communication

Researchers: Yanran Zhang, Yan Gu, Marc Swerts

The language caregivers use to their children is known as child-directed language (CDL). It is different from adult-directed language (ADL) in many aspects across modalities, such as a higher mean pitch, a slower speaking rate and shorter mean length of utterances, and lower lexical diversity with more iconic gestures. So far, there are few studies considering multimodal child-directed communication, and hardly any studies investigating individual differences in child-directed language. We build up a corpus to study multimodal child-directed language in the context of broadcasting, and examine the effect of individual differences on CDL.

CMBC (Chinese multimodal broadcasting corpus) includes data from future broadcasters (N=82, ongoing, female=46, male=36) of their adult-directed broadcasting (ADB) and child-directed broadcasting (CDB) programmes, respectively. The corpus is rich in studying prosodic, linguistic, and gesture features (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Multimodal adjustments between ADB and CDB.

In addition, we have collected participants’ empathy level and the Big Five personality traits to link multimodal adjustment between language context and individual differences. As also can be seen in Figure 2, the degree of adjustment in each cue between CDB and adult-directed ADB is different across participants, which can be influenced by speakers’ empathy and Big Five personality traits (See e.g., Figure 2 and 3).

Figure 2: Lower-empathetic participant in ADB (left) and CDB (right)

Figure 3: Higher-empathetic participants in ADB (left) and right (CDB)

Four intern projects are available (the knowledge of understanding Mandarin is required):
1. What is the relationship between speech and gestures? For example, is speaking rate related to gesture frequency or gesture speed in child-directed and adult-directed language?
2. Gender differences in multimodal child-directed communication.
3. Distinctive features of multimodal child-directed language (e.g., lexical, syntactic, prosodic and gestural features).
4. Multimodal contrastivity: Speech, prosody and gestures.

*Contact should be sent to y.zhang@tilburguniversity.edu

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Scientific mission of LOT

The aim of LOT is to create a scientific community in which this research can be optimally pursued, and to educate the next generation of researchers with an open mind toward new disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments, theoretical and methodological alternatives, and possible applications.

LOT stimulates new initiatives and developments in research, and provides a national forum to further communication between the participating institutes with a view to short- and long-term collaboration.

LOT School Series

LOT was officially established in June 1994 by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The LOT school series soon acquired an international reputation as a result of inviting well-known linguists to teach at the schools.

The research by the LOT institutes covers all major areas of linguistics, and exploits a wide range of methodological tools and theoretical frameworks.

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