معرفی
Junior-Prof. Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter is Junior Professor for General and Applied Phonetics at the University of Trier, where she has directed the Phonetics Department since 2021 and co-speaks the Trier Center for Language and Communication. She earned her doctorate (summa cum laude) from the University of Konstanz in 2019 and subsequently worked as a post-doc in the DFG-funded project "Questions at the Interfaces".
Research interests revolve around the production and perception of prosody, cross-linguistic comparison of prosody and meaning, early phonological acquisition, second-language prosodic transfer, and human/child-computer interaction. She employs experimental techniques such as eye-tracking, infant looking-time paradigms, forced-choice perception tests, and advanced statistical modelling (GAMMs).
Her recent articles (2020-2024) reveal a strong focus on how intonation marks rhetorical vs. information-seeking questions in German, Mandarin, and other languages, how L1 tone experience shapes L2 pitch-accent learning, and how regional accent variation affects the processing of irony and focus. Interdisciplinary work extends to dog-directed speech, voice-assistant interaction, and active-learning algorithms for stimulus selection.
She currently teaches statistics for phoneticians, instrumental phonetics, Swiss-German phonetics, and language-acquisition phonetics at BA and MA level, and welcomes student thesis projects in her BabyLab and adult-experiment labs.
