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Jun.-Prof. Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter
University of Trier
Current position and functions
  • Junior Professor for General and Applied Phonetics at the University of Trier (since March 2021)
  • Director of the Phonetics Department at the University of Trier (Geschäftsführerin, since October 2021)
  • Co-Speaker of the Trier Center for Language and Communication (TCLC, since December 2021)
  • Senior member of SpeechNet BaWü+

Research foci
  • Production, perception, and processing of prosody
  • Cross-linguistic aspects of prosody & meaning
  • First and second language acquisition
  • Socio-phonetics
  • Human/child computer interaction

News

2026

April 2026: Keynote at ICPL
  • Will have a keynote lecture at the 4th International Conference on Prominence in Language (ICPL) taking place at the University of Cologne!
February 2026: DGfS 2026 happening in Trier
  • We're more than excited to host the 48th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society. Check our website for more details!
January 2026: Article in TCLC Book Project in press
  • Arndt-Lappe, S., Wich-Reif, C. & Zahner-Ritter, K. (in press). Minimal units of patterns in linguistics – between bottom-up induction and theories of linguistic cognition and convention. In S. Arndt-Lappe, M. Belosevic, P. Maurer, C. Moulin, A. Rettinger & S. Stumpf (Eds). Patterns in Language and Communication. Between Theoretical Grounding and Empirical Methods. De Gruyter. 

2025

December 2025: Two new DFG-projects granted - starting in 2026!
  • DFG-ANR-Project: „PROSOFLIP – French-German L2 Prosody: from the Lab into Practice“ (with Prof. Dr. Ingo Feldhausen, Université de Lorraine, and Dr. Jürgen Trouvain, Saarland University); Funding period: 01.09.2026-31.08.2029
  • Project as part of the CRC 1760 "Silence, Noise and Signal in Language” (University of Konstanz):
    ​C02: "Intonation and Sociolinguistic Factors in Regionally Accented Speech" (with Dr. Marieke Einfeldt (University of Konstanz); Funding period: 01.04.2026-31.12.2029
December 2025: New paper out! Great interdisciplinary endeavour
  • Braun, B., Dehé, N., Einfeldt, M., James, A., Kazak, E., Sevastjanova, R., & Zahner-Ritter, K. (2025). A multi-cue study to the interpretation of German information-seeking and rhetorical questions. Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 16(1), 1-40. https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.17271
June 2025: New paper out! Congratulations to my PhD student
  • Kampschulte, Z., Braun, A., & Zahner-Ritter, K. (2025). Intonational focus marking by Syrian Arabic learners of German: On the role of cross-linguistic influence and proficiency. Languages, 10(7), 155. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070155
March 2025: New paper out!
  • Feldhausen, I., Trouvain, J., & Zahner-Ritter, K. (2025). Prosody for teaching French as a foreign language: First steps in identifying needs among teachers. Pedagogical Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.24015.fel

Get in touch...

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter
University of Trier
Universitätsring 15, 54296 Trier, Germany

room:   B303
phone: +49 (0)651 201-2276

​https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katharina_Zahner​
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1954-6436