Melanie Weirich

Prof. Melanie Weirich holds the Heisenberg Professorship for Speech Science and Phonetics at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. She is Co-PI of the DFG-funded project C02 'Variation in Situated Interaction' within the Collaborative Research Center 1412 'Register'. Her research focuses on phonetic variation, sociophonetics, and the interplay of biological and social factors in speech production and perception. She has held academic positions at the University of Konstanz and Humboldt University Berlin, and her work bridges experimental phonetics with sociolinguistic inquiry.

Education: PhD (2012) in Phonetics from Humboldt University Berlin; Master's (2006) in Phonetics and German as a Foreign Language from University of Trier.

Research Interests: Phonetic register variation, gender and voice perception, acoustic-phonetic analysis in child/adult-directed speech, and the role of hormones in vocal expression. Her projects include longitudinal studies on parental speech and cross-cultural comparisons of phonetic variation.

Publications & Awards: Over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including key contributions on twins' speech and gendered voice perception. Recipient of the Heisenberg Professorship (2021) and DFG grants for studies on vocal gender representation and parental speech variability.

Teaching: Courses on sociophonetic data analysis, experimental methods in phonetics, and linguistic variation. Active in developing innovative data collection tools like the Plapper app for self-recording.