Dr Bodo Winter

Photograph of Dr Bodo Winter

Department of English Language and Linguistics
Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics

Contact details

Email
b.winter@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@BodoWinter
View my research portal
Address
Frankland Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I am an Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. My research uses data science-driven linguistics to study multimodal communication, including iconicity, gesture and metaphor. For my Future Leaders Fellowship, I investigate how people communicate numerical information across different communication channels. 

Webpage: http://www.bodowinter.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BodoWinter

Qualifications

  • UKRI Future Leaders Fellow
  • Editor-in-Chief, Language & Cognition (Cambridge University Press)
  • PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
  • MA in General Linguistics, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Biography

I began working at the University of Birmingham in 2016. I received an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. I also worked as a doctoral fellow and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

Teaching

I teach a range of BA and MA modules, including Language and the Mind, Psycholinguistics, Language and the Senses, Lexical Semantics and Applied Statistics for Linguists.

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Winter is interested in supervising PhD research in the areas of:

Numerical cognition
Iconicity and gesture
Sensory language
Language evolution
Metaphor

Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

For my work, I use data-science driven linguistics to study the intersection of language and cognition. My book Sensory Linguistics (John Benjamins) is an in-depth analysis of English sensory adjectives — how people talk about colors, tastes, smells, and other sensory impressions. For my Future Leaders Fellowship (starting 2021), I will investigate the multimodal communication of numerical information — how people talk about numbers and use graphs and gesture to drive data-driven decisions. A unifying theme across my work is a strong commitment to open science and reproducible research practices. I’ve also written an introductory textbook on statistical modeling, Statistics for Linguists (Routledge).

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Woodin, G, Winter, B, Littlemore, J, Perlman, M & Grieve, J 2023, 'Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English', Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0082

Brown, L, Kim, H & Winter, B 2022, 'Is It Polite to Hiss?: Nonverbal Sound Objects as Markers of (Im)politeness in Korean', Frontiers in Communication, vol. 7, 854066. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.854066

Roessig, S, Winter, B & Mücke, D 2022, 'Tracing the Phonetic Space of Prosodic Focus Marking', Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5, 842546. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.842546

Winter, B, Sóskuthy, M, Perlman, M & Dingemanse, M 2022, 'Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages', Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, 1035. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04311-7

Ćwiek, A, Fuchs, S, Draxler, C, Asu, EL, Dediu, D, Hiovain, K, Kawahara, S, Koutalidis, S, Krifka, M, Lippus, P, Lupyan, G, Oh, GE, Paul, J, Petrone, C, Ridouane, R, Reiter, S, Schümchen, N, Szalontai, Á, Ünal‑Logacev, Ö, Zeller, J, Winter, B & Perlman, M 2021, 'Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures', Scientific Reports, vol. 11, no. 1, 10108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89445-4

Winter, B & Bürkner, P 2021, 'Poisson regression for linguists: a tutorial introduction to modelling count data with brms', Language and Linguistics Compass, vol. 15, no. 11, e12439. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12439

Winter, B, Oh, GE, Hübscher, I, Idemaru, K, Brown, L, Prieto, P & Grawunder, S 2021, 'Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena', Royal Society of London. Proceedings B. Biological Sciences, vol. 376, no. 1840, 20200400. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0400

Winter, B & Perlman, M 2021, 'Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon', Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1646

Woodin, G, Winter, B, Perlman, M, Littlemore, J & Matlock, T 2020, ''Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive', PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 11, e0242142. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242142

Winter, B & Duffy, S 2020, 'Can co-speech gestures alone carry the mental time line?', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 1768-1781. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000836

Savino, M, Winter, B, Bosco, A & Grice, M 2020, 'Intonation does aid serial recall after all', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 366-372. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01708-4

Idemaru, K, Winter, B, Brown, L & Oh, GE 2020, 'Loudness trumps pitch in politeness judgments: evidence from Korean', Language and Speech, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 123–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918824344

Winter, B & Yoshimi, J 2020, 'Metaphor and the Philosophical Implications of Embodied Mathematics', Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, 569487, pp. 569487. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.569487

Winter, B, Duffy, S & Littlemore, J 2020, 'Power, gender, and individual differences in spatial metaphor: the role of perceptual stereotypes and language statistics', Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 188-205 . https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2020.1794319

Idemaru, K, Winter, B & Brown, L 2019, 'Cross-cultural multimodal politeness: The phonetics of Japanese deferential speech in comparison to Korean', Intercultural Pragmatics. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2019-0027

View all publications in research portal

Culture and collections

Schools, institutes and departments

Services and facilities