Dr Kai Alter

I studied French, Italian, Russian, and Nahuatl and Linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

My PhD Thesis was about French Exclamatory and Interrogative Intonation at the Syntax-Prosody Interface.

I extended my research on Sentence and word level connecting different topics, such as brain activity and Speech recognition. My Habilitation (a German approach to have sort of a second compulsory PhD – the Venia legendi – legally allowing to teach and supervise students at University level) was about the interface between Neuroscience and Speech and Language processing.

Between my PhD and Habilitation, I worked at two renowned Research Institutes – the Austrian Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence (OefAI) in Vienna and the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig.

At OefAI, I was involved in a pre-cursor of ChatGPT (VIECTOS – the Vienna Concept to Speech System) modelling the interface between automatically generated text and computerised speech output on lexical and prosodic level.

At MPI CBS, I worked on Neurocognition of Prosody as an Independent Junior Research Group Leader working on sentence and lexical prosody, and emotional processing using brain imaging techniques such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI.

At Newcastle University, I extended my research into neurological conditions such as Dyslexia and Tinnitus. I mainly investigate Auditory processing, Neuroscience, and Prosody by means of EEG. My neurobiological study spans a wide range of topics, including Resting state EEG, Perception and the Motor system.