• CV

    (Academic) Work Experience
    03/2016 - 02/2017 Internship (Research assistant in the field of Phonetics)
    09/2013 - 08/2014 Lecturer of English at Kazan Federal University
    07/2013 - 07/2013 Interpreter at Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia
    since 09/2014 Freelance writer in Applied Linguistics for the non-linguistic audience
    Academic Background
    10/2017 Ph. D. Student (Graduate School Empirical and Applied Linguistics),  University of Münster
    10/2014 - 08/2017 Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics), University of Bonn
    09/2012 - 01/2014 Certificate of courses accomplished in Spanish Language and Literature, Kazan Federal University
    09/2008 - 07/2013 Diploma with Honours (English Teaching, Linguistics), Kazan Federal University

  • Dissertation project

    Voice-based human-computer interaction: Talking to a non-cooperative partner in a foreign language

    The present study is aimed at exploring speech adaptation abilities of foreign language learners, and multilingual speakers in communication with a non-cooperative interlocutor. There is a growing interest in this type of communication because automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are becoming more available and are vastly present in human daily life. They might be seen as non-cooperative and egocentric in the sense that they are created for the mass audience of users throughout the world.

    The systems like Apple’s Siri are there to help human beings in their daily activities. However, despite the success of the general idea of voice-interaction, according to a recent analysis, the number of humans who actually use this option on their smart phones and other portable devices is “frustratingly low” (Moore 2017:281). The problem may lie in the fact that the majority of ASR systems were developed in isolation from the studies in various fields of linguistics. However, the research on human-human communication, e.g. native with non-native speaker, child with an adult and others, may provide some important insights into the peculiarities of human-computer interaction. The key to understanding the process of speech adaptation may lie in the mechanistic approach to the communication process. According to the emergence-through-use approach, each communicative agent has a lexicon which they update on the basis of personal success or failure in communication. The process of learning continues during the lifetime (Barr 2004).

    We hypothesize that the ability to use speech adaptation strategies may be the result of being exposed to a larger variety of communities. The more diverse the communication experience is, the better the language learners adapt their speech on lexical, syntactic and phonetic levels. In other words, the ability to perform better in a specific kind of task in the speaker’s foreign language may be achieved not only by improving their foreign language level. Speech adaptation abilities might also be improved by trying to use foreign language with a wider variety of speakers, e.g. speakers of differing language proficiency, with other native languages, and by learning and speaking different languages.