Maria Staudte Postdoctoral Researcher M2CI - Cluster of Excellence Saarland University Department of Computational Linguistics Building C 7.1, Room 1.16 66123 Saarbruecken Germany tel: +49 681 302 6552 e-mail: masta AT coli DOT uni-sb DOT de

Research

My research interests center around situated and multimodal communication, i.e., how individuals interact in a shared environment by means of various information channels such as language, gaze and gesture. Specifically, I am interested in finding out which information gaze and referential gestures may convey and how this affects speech production and comprehension. One important question is, for instance, how such non-linguistic cues mediate (visual) attention and influence the on-line mapping between language and the visual environment.
To investigate these issues, I look at the interaction of people and artificial agents (robots as well as virtual agents). Such agents have the benefit of being fully controllable confederates for which erroneous or odd behaviour is acceptable such that a broader range of manipulations and phenomena can be conducted and investigated.