These two open postdoc positions form part of a larger project investigating ‘international sign’ (IS) or ‘cross-signing’: the communication between signers who do not share any sign languages in their linguistic repertoires. The project considers two extremes in terms of the amount of experience that signers have: on the one hand inexperienced deaf signers, and on the other hand experienced conference interpreters working between English and IS. The postdoc researchers will be responsible for investigating the communicative success achieved by these two categories of signers, while the PhD candidates will be responsible for investigating the communication strategies used. Further team members are Onno Crasborn (principal investigator; hearing), Merel van Zuilen (research assistant; deaf), and Maya de Wit (junior researcher and interpreting consultant; hearing).

Position 1: You will contribute to the study design and data collection of the one-on-one interactions, and investigate the communicative success achieved in the tasks which signers carried out (in terms of task performance, speed, and smoothness of the interaction). In addition, you will contribute to the study of the linguistic distances between the four sign languages involved, and possibly further sign languages. You will be responsible for developing new measures of distances between sign languages at various linguistic levels.

Position 2: You will contribute to the study design and data collection aimed at comparing English-NGT and English-IS interpreting. You will be responsible for investigating the communicative success of the interpreting process (by means of post-hoc interviews with the audience members), and designing and collecting more controlled comprehension measures.

Like the other team members, you will be responsible for publishing research findings in high-impact journals, and for exploiting the research outcomes to the benefit of organisations like WFD and EUD, as well as for improving interpreter training curricula.

- PhD degree in linguistics, psycholinguistics, or cognitive science;
- good (CEFR level C1) to native skills in at least one sign language;
- knowledge of additional sign languages (in particular ASL and BSL) is preferred;
- extensive experience with international communication with deaf signers with other language backgrounds;
- demonstrable experience with study design and state-of-the-art statistic techniques;
- for the first position: experience with analysing corpus and lexicon data;
- for the second position: experience with working as an interpreter is recommended;
- extensive experience working as part of a larger research team;
- excellent communication skills in written English, and if hearing, in spoken English.

you will be appointed for an initial period of 12 months, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, the contract will be extended by 2 years (based on a full-time position)
- you will be ranked as a Postdoctoral Researcher (Onderzoeker 3) in the Dutch university job-ranking system (UFO);
depending on experience, the gross salary will be between €3,475 and €4,757 (scale 11)
Deaf candidates are explicitly encouraged to apply.

Radboud University

Strategically located in Europe, Radboud University is one of the leading academic communities in the Netherlands. A place with a personal touch, where top-flight education and research take place on a beautiful green campus in modern buildings with state-of-art facilities.

http://www.ru.nl

Faculty of Arts

The Faculty of Arts consists of ten departments in the areas of language and culture, history, history of arts, linguistics and communication and information studies, which together cater for about 2,400 students and collaborate closely in teaching and research.

Research at the Faculty of Arts is embedded in two research institutes: the Institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies (HLCS) and the Centre for Language Studies (CLS). State-of-the-art research facilities are available to all researchers.

The Sign Language Linguistics research group headed by Onno Crasborn forms part of CLS, and has a 15-year history of deaf-hearing collaboration on the study of NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). The group is active in linguistic analysis and psycholinguistic studies of NGT, the creation of language resources such as Signbank and the Corpus NGT, and the study of Kata Kolok.

To facilitate deaf-hearing interaction with people outside the group, Dutch public services provide good interpreting services for any type of meeting, including conference visits and data collection travel abroad if needed.

No commercial propositions please.

http://www.ru.nl/facultyofarts ; www.ru.nl/sign-lang