Postdoc Position: Computational Modelling of Speech Recognition at the Donders Centre for Cognition

Are you fascinated by the human ability to recognise speech and do you enjoy advanced programming? If so, this postdoctoral position in computational modelling is for you. You will have the exciting opportunity to build and test a new Bayesian model of human speech recognition.

You will work together with Prof. James McQueen and a PhD candidate on an NWO-funded project (’Plugging talkers in: A new solution to the variability problem in human speech recognition’). The project seeks to understand how listeners cope with the fact that spoken words are acoustically hugely variable. Words vary across talkers (e.g. the same word is pronounced in a physically dramatically different manner by a two-year-old girl versus an 80-year-old man) and words vary not only segmentally but also prosodically. The project explores the hypothesis that listeners store knowledge about how individual talkers speak and ’plug in’ that knowledge as they recognise those individuals’ words. The project has two aims: (1) to use computational modelling to build a new Bayesian model with ’plug-ins’, and (2) to run word-learning experiments to test the model. You will be responsible for the computational modelling and also co-supervise the PhD candidate who will be running the experiments.

Requirements:

• You hold a PhD in psycholinguistics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, or a related field.
• You enjoy reading and writing code and have demonstrable programming experience in, for example, Python, C++, or Matlab.
• You are a creative, critical and independent researcher and motivated to pursue an academic career.
• You are a team-player who not only provides constructive feedback to colleagues but is also happy to receive it from them, who supports others, and who is keen to engage in scientific discussions. You enjoy supervising students.
• You are able to contribute to a collaborative work environment based on transparent communication and a positive and respectful attitude towards supervisors, colleagues and students.
• You have an excellent command of English (both spoken and written); preferably, you also already have a good publication record.
• You possess excellent time management and organisational skills.
• Ideally, but not required, you also have expertise and hands-on research experience in human speech recognition, good skills in preparing and analysing speech experiments, and demonstrable experience with R and Praat.

Salary Benefits:

• We will give you a temporary employment contract of 4 years.
• Your salary within salary scale 11 depends on your previous education and number of years of (relevant) work experience. The amounts in the scale are based on a 38-hour working week.
• You will receive an 8% holiday allowance and an 8,3% end-of-year bonus.
• You will be able to use our Dual Career and Family Support Service. The Dual Career Programme assists your partner via support, tools, and resources to improve their chances of independently finding employment in the Netherlands. Our Family Support Service helps you and your partner feel welcome and at home by providing customised assistance in navigating local facilities, schools, and amenities. Also take a look at our support for international staff page to discover all our services for international employees.
• You will receive extra days off. With full-time employment, you can choose between 30 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the statutory 20.

Work and science require good employment practices. This is reflected in Radboud University's primary and secondary employment conditions. You can make arrangements for the best possible work-life balance with flexible working hours, various leave arrangements and working from home. You are also able to compose part of your employment conditions yourself, for example, exchange income for extra leave days and receive a reimbursement for your sports subscription. And of course, we offer a good pension plan. You are given plenty of room and responsibility to develop your talents and realise your ambitions. Therefore, we provide various training and development schemes.

27 - 38 hours per week

Houtlaan 4