February 2025

Defne Abur and Miles Wischnewski receive Seed Grant Award at the winter meting for the Research School for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN). Their collaborative project will assess how tACS can influence vocal motor control.

Samira Barzegar wins Best Poster Award at the winter meting for the Research School for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN)
January 2025

Thomas Tienkamp participates in panel for innovative science communication
Thomas Tienkamp attended the Grote Taaldag as part of a panel on innovative science communication. Alongside two other early career researchers, he shared insights on the rewards and challenges of scientific outreach. Thomas highlighted the lab’s efforts to bring speech science to the public through interactive activities at (music) festivals.
December 2024

Thomas Tienkamp’s research featured in Het Parool newspaper
Read the full article here

New paper in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders
Read more about this systematic review on articulatory-kinematic changes in speech following oral and oropharyngeal cancer led by Thomas Tienkamp here.

Lab members attended the “Patients in Research” Symposium at the University of Groningen Medical Center. The event featured discussions with patients, clinicians, and researchers on best practices to organize and implement patient involvement in a meaningful way in research.
November 2024

Research and Education in Ageing Collaborative Team (REACT) receives funding from ENLIGHT Thematic Network
The REACT project involves team members across 6 institutions: University of Galway, University of Tartu, University of the Basque Country, University of Groningen, University of Ghent, and the University of Bern. The overarching goal is to consolidate interdisciplinary expertise in research, education, and community engagement in the field of ageing to develop publicly informed activities to increase health and well-being of our ageing society.
Defne Abur and Katharina Polsterer will contribute research on speech and cognitive factors in aging to the project as part of the University of Groningen team.

Our collaborative work with Miles Wischnewski on functionally-relevant neural oscillations for voice has been accepted to the 6th International Brain Stimulation Conference!
October 2024
Lab members travelled to Genova, Italy for the Festival della Scienza 2024! The team did educational outreach on speech science and collected data for a project about pitch control across age with the mobile van. Special thanks to all of the scientific volunteers and organizers throughout the festival.
September 2024
August 2024

At the end of August, the lab attended the 2024 Noorderzon Festival of Performing Arts & Society in Groningen with our speech van to do outreach and experimental data collection. Defne Abur also gave a public lecture related to what we can learn from our voice

The lab is thrilled to welcome Dan Mu as a PhD researcher on our new project with Dr. Frank Tsiwah. Dan will start her project later this year, stay tuned for more exciting updates from Dan!
July 2024

Thank you for a wonderful talk and interesting discussions.
June 2024




Lab members presented at the 44th edition of TABU Dag
May 2024







April 2024

and Cognitive Neurosciences Science Jam – urban sketching workshop

March 2024

Congratulations to Valentine Lucquiault who received a PRIME Award from Bangor University. This award will support her travel to Wales to work on an internship with Dr. Charlie Wiltshire

Katharina Polsterer gave a talk at the Linguistics Lunch on a developmental perspective on auditory discrimination

Defne Abur was selected for the Young Academy Groningen (YAG). The YAG is a group of early career researchers across the University of Groningen and UMCG with a passion for science and scholarship and its broader impacts on academia and society. Read more about the YAG and their initiatives here.
February 2024





Katharina Polsterer, Thomas Tienkamp, and Teja Rebernik presented their work. Teja Rebernik also won a Kathy Yorkston Travel Award!
Katharina Polsterer receives Faculty of Arts Master Thesis Award
Congratulations to Katharina Polsterer for receiving this year’s Faculty of Arts Master Thesis Award for her excellent work entitled “Characterising auditory-motor adaptation of vowel production across age”

January 2024

New paper in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Read more about this work led by Thomas Tienkamp on articulatory working space in individuals treated for oral cancer here.

BCN Winter Meeting 2024
Lab members attended the Behavioral
and Cognitive Neurosciences Research
School Winter Meeting, where Defne Abur
and Sanne Moorman gave a talk on their
collaborative project on vocal motor control

At the Center for Language and Cognition’s Winter Party, Thomas Tienkamp takes home the prize for the best powerpoint karaoke presenter
December 2023

Read more about this work investigating the impact of a concurrent working memory task on speech acoustics in Parkinson’s disease here.


November 2023

Read more about this work on the reliability of sudden and gradual auditory-motor responses here

Defne Abur gave a talk at Sapienza University’s Department of Human Neuroscience on speech motor control in Parkinson’s disease
October 2023

Read more about this work pooling data from 22 studies to assess auditory-motor responses here.

Read more about this work assessing auditory-motor function before and after voice therapy here.
September 2023

Read more about this work evaluating Camera Mouse as a computer access system for augmented and alternative communication in cerebral palsy here.

The speech lab van traveled to the
Academiegebouw for the Zpannend
Zernike festival
August 2023

The computational linguistics group took a weekend trip together to the island Schiermonnikoog

Teja presented her project “5-minute formant adaptation task in Dutch children” at the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences in Prague

The speech lab van traveled to Noorderzon
as the final leg of the summer tour!
July 2023

Read more about this work on the relationship between pitch discrimination and fundamental frequency variation here.

June 2023
43rd TABU Dag Conference at the University of Groningen
Lab members & collaborators presented at the TABU Dag Conference

Excited to announce that our grant The impact of aging, cognition, and sensory function on speech was funded and Katharina Polsterer will lead the project.

Check out the article in the university newspaper here.
May 2023

Read more about this work reporting normative values for acoustic measures of voice CPP here.

Defne Abur and local company SlimStampen
(T. Wilschut & H. van Rijn) were awarded a HELLO
grant for the topic of “Digital Innovation” from the University of Groningen.
April 2023

The project “5-minute formant adaptation task in Dutch children” led by Teja Rebernik, and together with SBP Lab members Thomas Tienkamp, Katharina Polsterer, and Defne Abur, was accepted to the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences 2023

Defne Abur, Catherine Sibert, Thomas Wilschut, and Hedderik van Rijn were awarded an interdisciplinary grant (€6,000) from the University of Groningen to combine their expertise in cognitive science, cognitive modeling, and speech motor control to investigate cognitive processes in speech.
March 2023

AQL Conference
Defne Abur attended the 15th International Conference on Advances in Quantitative Laryngology, Voice and Speech Research. She presented her collaborative research project on speech motor control in vocal hyperfunction pre- and post-voice therapy & had a reunion with the Stepp Lab
February 2023

Thomas Tienkamp presented his poster on his recent work at the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences Research School (BCN) Winter Meeting

Defne Abur and Sanne Moorman were awarded a BCN Seed Grant (€10,000) for their project examining vocal motor control of loudness.
January 2023

Thomas Tienkamp gave a talk at the Linguistics Lunch on his project “Acoustic & kinematic vowel space in individuals surgically treated for oral cancer”
December 2022

Thomas Tienkamp and Defne Abur gave a lecture at The Spence School in NYC on SBP lab research.

The speech lab group goes curling!

Congratulations to Thomas Tienkamp, for publishing part of his Master’s research (with The Netherlands Cancer Institute) in the Journal of Communication Disorders! Read more here.
October 2022

Speech Lab Group at the Festival
della Scienza gala dinner.

The sound booth van travelled to Festival della Scienza! Thank you to the organizers and festival volunteers (pictured) who were a huge help throughout the week, and to everyone who stopped by and participated in our research.
September 2022

First lab meeting of the semester!

The sound booth van travelled to Letteren festival! The festival included workshops, lectures, scientific experiments, demonstrations and tours from across several fields in the faculty of arts + live music, food trucks, and a Victorian style photobooth.
August 2022

Thomas Tienkamp presented his work “Quantifying Changes in Articulatory Working Space Following Oral Cancer Treatment“

Teja Rebernik presented her work “Investigating feedback and feedforward control of vowel production by Dutch adult speakers: insights from auditory feedback perturbation tasks“

The sound booth van travelled to Noorderzon!