Felicitas Kleber

Felicitas Kleber is Professor of Speech Science in the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University (Universität des Saarlandes). Her research profile demonstrates extensive expertise in experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology with a particular focus on German dialects and sound change phenomena. She maintains active research collaborations, most notably with J. Harrington and Ulrich Reubold, resulting in numerous high-impact publications in leading linguistics and phonetics journals.

Her research interests span experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology with specific expertise in speech production and perception, sound change processes, German dialectology, phonological acquisition, and prosody and intonation analysis. Her work frequently examines the acoustic, perceptual, and articulatory dimensions of speech, particularly focusing on vowel and consonant quantity phenomena in German varieties.

Analysis of her publication record reveals consistent methodological rigor with emphasis on acoustic analysis, perception experiments, and longitudinal studies. Her research often investigates sound changes in progress, particularly examining vowel fronting phenomena in both German and English varieties, and the relationship between speech production and perception mechanisms. Much of her work employs apparent-time analyses to track diachronic changes through synchronic variation across age groups.

Professor Kleber serves as an Associate editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, reflecting her standing in the field. She has secured significant research funding including the DFG-funded project "Typology of vowel and consonant quantity in South German varieties: acoustic, auditory, and articulatory analyses of adult and child speakers" (2016-2024) and the DAAD-supported "Form and function of prosodic structure in Hungarian and German" (2015-2016). Her research methodology typically combines acoustic analysis with perception experiments and sometimes articulatory measurements to provide comprehensive insights into phonetic phenomena.