We are pleased to announce that Markus Christiner, who has been collaborating with Center members Peter Schneider and Annemarie Seither-Preisler in the international 'musicandbrain AG' for many years (https://www.musicandbrain.de/team.html; formerly Heidelberg, since the beginning of the year 2022 in Graz), will start a 4-year APART habilitation fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a staff member of our Center on November 1.
The title of this international project is 'Crossing borders: Examining individual differences in the melodic perception of dialects and languages - A journey from musicology and (socio-)linguistics to neurophysiology'. The aim is to investigate the factors that determine the perceived 'musicality' of a language and why certain languages (all EU languages including Turkish, Russian, Mandarin) and various dialects (German, Latvian, Taiwanese) are perceived as more melodic than others. The project is multi-layered, interdisciplinary and includes aspects from psychology, neurophysiology, musicology and linguistics.
Internationally, there is a cooperation with the Jazeps Vitols Music Academy and the Language Institute in Riga (Latvia). Furthermore, there is a cooperation with the Institute of Linguistics at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as cooperations with the Institute of German Studies and the Department of Comparative Linguistics in Vienna. In addition, there is a cooperation with the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, where research will be conducted on how European languages and dialects are perceived outside Europe.
