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Maria Staudte Maria has left Saarland University Sept 2020. Leader of the Independent Research Group PI on the SFB/CRC "Information Density and Linguistic Encoding" M2CI - Cluster of Excellence Saarland University Department of Language Science & Technology Building C 7.4, Room 2.05 66123 Saarbruecken Germany tel: +49 681 302 6552 e-mail: masta AT coli DOT uni MINUS saarland DOT de | 
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- If you are looking for a thesis topic, send me an e-mail.
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. Another question is whether the processing of such multimodal information (coming from language, the shared scene, and the interaction partner) can be unified under an information-theoretic approach.
To investigate some of these issues, I also look at the interaction of people and artificial (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.