PhD Position 6: Multisensory Prosody in Portuguese Sign Language (TRAD-PREDOCTORAL-2026-04)

Note: This page is for informative purposes only. The official call (particularly, the legal requirements for candidates) and all information related to the selection process (admission, short list, final result) is published in the Department’s website.

Position description:

The Prosodic and Gestural Studies Research Group (GREPG) in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) invites applications for a fully funded PhD position within the ERC Advanced Grant PROSODY-SENSES: Prosody across senses: Testing a reconceptualization of prosody as a modality-neutral component of language governing spoken, visual and tactile signals, led by Prof. Pilar Prieto.

PhD6: Multisensory Prosody in European Portuguese Sign Language

The successful candidate will contribute to Strand 2 of the project, investigating the multisensory implementation of prosody in Portuguese Sign Language (Língua Gestual Portuguesa, LGP). The project will examine how prominence, grouping, and other prosodic functions are realized across spoken and sign language modalities through speech, facial expressions, head and body movements, and manual and non-manual articulations. Drawing on controlled production experiments and multimodal corpora, the candidate will combine kinematic, and linguistic analyses with three-dimensional motion capture to investigate modality-neutral principles of prosodic organization. The candidate will contribute to the development of annotation protocols and quantitative analyses for modelling the magnitude and temporal coordination of prosodic cues across speech and sign, working closely with the ERC postdoctoral researcher responsible for multimodal motion-capture modelling.

The dissertation will follow an article-based format, comprising three to four publishable papers in international peer-reviewed journals. The PhD will be carried out under a cotutelle agreement between the University of Lisbon and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The candidate will be jointly supervised by Prof. Sónia Frota and Dr. Marisa Cruz (University of Lisbon) and Prof. Pilar Prieto (ICREA–Universitat Pompeu Fabra), ensuring close integration between the two institutions throughout the doctoral training. The cotutelle arrangement will provide complementary expertise in sign language prosody, multimodal communication, and cross-modal linguistic theory, while giving the candidate access to the research infrastructure, training opportunities, and academic environments of both universities. In addition, the candidate will receive close scientific guidance from two ERC-funded postdoctoral researchers specializing in multimodal motion-capture modelling, who will provide mentorship and methodological expertise throughout the project.

Tasks:

• Design and conduct experimental studies on the multisensory production of prosody in Portuguese Sign Language (Língua Gestual Portuguesa, LGP).

• Collect multimodal datasets using synchronized audio-video recording and optical motion capture.

•  Annotate and analyze facial, head, and manual and non-manual movement data.

• Contribute to the development of quantitative models of multimodal prosodic coordination in sign languages.

• Publish research articles in leading international journals.

• Present results at international conferences.

• Participate actively in project meetings, seminars, workshops, and dissemination activities.

• Contribute to collaborative activities within the ERC project.

Eligibility

Applicants must:

• Hold (or be close to completing) a Master's degree in Linguistics, Experimental Phonetics, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, or a closely related discipline.

• Demonstrate strong interest in multisensory prosody, multimodal communication, language production, or experimental phonetics.

• Have experience with experimental research and quantitative data analysis.

• Have previous experience writing scientific articles or conference papers.

• Demonstrate excellent teamwork and communication skills.

• Demonstrate knowledge of Portuguese Sign Language or possibly another sign language, as the project involves the collection and analysis of Portuguese Sign Language data. 

• Have excellent written and spoken English. As the PhD will be conducted in English, previous knowledge of Catalan is not required. However, the successful candidate is expected to begin learning Catalan and Portuguese as soon as possible and actively participate in the local research environment at UPF and U Lisbon respectively.

• Experience with motion capture, audiovisual annotation, ELAN, R, or Python will be considered an advantage.

• Academic excellence and previous research experience (40%)

• Quality and relevance of Master's thesis and previous publications (25%)

• Fit with the scientific objectives of PROSODY-SENSES (20%)

• Personal interview, during which the candidate's motivation, communication skills, research potential, knowledge of the research area, ability to work collaboratively, and overall fit with the project and its interdisciplinary research environment will be assessed (15%). 

Candidates obtaining at least 75/100 on the first three points may be invited for an interview.