A Postdoctoral research position is available in the Applied English Linguistics Section at the Department of English, University of Graz.

This position is attached to the project “Characterising Foreign Accent in First Language Attrition” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to Professor Ineke Mennen, the Principal Investigator (PI).

Specialty areas: phonetics, segments, prosody, L2 acquisition, L1 attrition.

Attentants will be working alongside the PI, two PhD students, a student assistant, and our international collaborator (Dr Robert Mayr, Cardiff Metropolitan University) on the aims of the project to characterise perceived phonetic L1 attrition, to relate it to acoustic changes in the L1 and L2, and to determine which predictor variables govern it.

The positions is fixed term, 34 hours per week, for a period of three years, starting in January 2020. The successful candidate will have a PhD in Phonetics or related disciplines. Extensive experience in acoustic and auditory phonetics (including both segments and prosody), with advanced skills in speech database management, signal processing, speech resynthesis and statistical analysis methods (e.g. multivariate statistics, linear mixed models, time-series analyses in R) are required. An interest in second language acquisition and/or L1 attrition is desirable. The candidate should be fluent in English, and ideally also in German.

Attentants will be expected to help run the project on a day-to-day basis, coordinate the experiments, and you will be responsible for analyzing data, for disseminating the project\s findings, and writing of research papers arising from the project. Please contact the PI for more information at ineke.mennen@uni-graz.at.

All interested in applying, please email (1) a cover letter outlining your background and suitability for the post; (2) a CV with a list of publications (where relevant); and (3) the names and contact information for three references.

– Closing date for applications: 29 November 2019

– Start date of the post: 6 January 2020

– Salary: minimum salary € 3,233.32 gross/month

– Email address for applications: gerlinda.trinkl@uni-graz.at