Update December 16th: Interacting Minds Centre is pleased to report that Lise Marie Andersen has been awarded a Sapere Laude grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF).  

Lise Marie Andersen is already a well known face at IMC, where she's been working as an associated researcher prior to her maternity leave in October this year. We're all looking forward to welcoming Lise Marie back to IMC in 2014, where she will be working on a project, which can only be described as befitting an interdisciplinary research centre such as Interacting Minds Centre. What follows is a project description in Lise Marie Andersen's own words

Lise Marie Andersen's project

This project explores the possibilities of developing a unified account of causation within the interdisciplinary sciences of the mind and brain. The working hypothesis will be that such interdisciplinarity can be given a solid ontological founding within the framework of the interventionist account of causal explanation, such as developed by Woodward (2003). The increase in interdisciplinary research that intersects psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience has, to a large extent, been combined with a tendency to prefer causal models that only involve neurological factors. This development contrasts with evidence found in current psychology and psychiatry, which depicts psychological phenomena as being causally influenced also by cultural and psychological factors. The working hypothesis of the project will be that applying an interventionist account of causation resolves this issue by providing a unified and rigorous causal framework that can guide experimental design and challenge the automatic preference given to basic biological causal claims.

Paving the Way for a More Reliable Linguistics

Marjoleine Sloos is currently studying Chinese phonology and phonetics at Tongji University in Shanghai, but is originally a Groeningen University alumnus (NL). She was awarded the Mobilix grant and will be conducting a research project entitled "Paving the Way for a More Reliable Linguistics". Below is a project description in Danish.

Transskriptioner af tale er vigtige redskaber i udtaleforskningen. For eksempel kan lydene i en bestemt dialekt kun analyseres statistisk, hvis de er blevet transskriberede. Transskriptioner bruges også indenfor fremmedsprogsundervisning, taleterapi og sprogrådgivning (som for eksempel i asylansøgninger). Transskriptioner laves i dag ofte med digitale talebehandlingsprogrammer, men de skal rettes manuelt, da software ikke fuldt ud kan erstatte menneskelige kodninger. Nogle lyde kan slet ikke analyseres ved hjælp af digitale talebehandlingsprogrammer. Men er menneskelige kodninger pålidelige? Svaret er sandsynligvis nej. Nyere undersøgelser har vist, at de fonetiske træk, som man hører, let påvirkes af en talendes accent. Det betyder, at den lyttendes forventninger påvirker de prototypiske særpræg, som han eller hun hører ved en accent, selv når disse særpræg ikke er til stede i det fonetiske signal. Selv professionelle transskribenter har vist sig at ligge under for egne forventninger. Mængden af afvigelser i formelle transskriptionsopgaver er stadig ukendt, og der er endnu ikke udviklet en standardprocedure for at opnå mere konsistente resultater. Formålet med denne forskning er at bidrage til udviklingen af standardiserede transskriptionskonventioner, der kan fungere som retningslinjer i sprogvidenskaben. Da menneskelige kodninger bør være så præcise og pålidelige som muligt, sigter denne forskning mod at udvikle en gylden standard for sproglige transskriptioner.