Marie Engemann

Conversation Designer & UX Researcher

I am working on chatbot projects in the area of conversation design, UX research and UX and accessible writing. I also support the development of chatbot flows in tools such as Cognigy.

PhD Researcher

I wrote a dissertation "Paradigm uniformity effects in inflectional stems: Durational differences in production and perception" as part of the DFG research unit "Spoken Morphology". My dissertation and other parts of my research were published or presented as listed under publications.

A list of courses I taught can be viewed below in the section Teaching.

Master of Arts

I completed my M.A. in the program Comparative Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture with a focus on English linguistics. The title of my M.A. thesis was "The Perception of Homophone Suffixes: The Case of Plural -s and Cliticised has".

During my M.A. studies, I had several part time jobs related to e-learning. One of the e-learning projects I created was Timelines to Visualize History.

During my M.A. studies, I also organized and presented at the student's conference "Breaking Boundaries", for which I also created the promotional material (poster and schedule).

My M.A. studies were financially supported from 2014-2016 by the "Deutschlandstipendium".

Bachelor of Arts

I completed my B.A. in the major English Studies and the minor General Linguistics.

During my B.A. studies, I spent a semester abroad at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where I took courses on linguistics and Australian studies.

Also during my B.A. studies, I worked as officer of communication for the student union (among other part-time jobs).

My B.A. studies were financially supported from 2012-2014 by the "Deutschlandstipendium".

Web Developer

I completed an apprenticeship in web development at anyMOTION GRAPHICS in January 2008, and then continued to work there as a full-time web developer until 2011.

My responsiblities included design and development of websites in CSS, HTML, PHP, JavaScript/jQuery and other programming languages, administration and content management of websites, newsletter marketing and graphic design.

During my PhD, I took a deep dive into the world of data science. This came natural to me, as I already had previous experience in coding from my web development days. However, I learned quite a lot about how to deal with data, including how to:

• retrieve and filter data from databases or dataframes
• clean, filter and transform data
• export acoustic information from annotated audio files
• statistically analyze data using different models and techniques, e.g. linear mixed effects regression modelling
• visualize data

Most of these were accomplished using R and R packages (e.g. dplyr, ggplot, lme4, etc.), SQL, and Python. I am eager to expand my skills on data science in regards to natural language processing and machine learning, especially using Python, and I'm currently learning to use the Python packages pandas, spaCy and plotnine.

From 2005 to 2011, I worked as a professional media designer and web developer. Though the world of web development has changed dramatically, I still have a high affinity to web and media design. Having studied these fields extensively, I have a professional understanding of:

• layouting and presenting data and information, both online and offline
• user-centered design approaches
• graphical manipulation in Adobe Photoshop
• coding in HTML/CSS/JS
• deployment and usage of content management systems

After over 10 years in academia, I have become a very skilled researcher and acquired many skills that transcend to many areas of my life. These include:

• observing and identifying patterns and potential problems
• formulating research questions and hypotheses from observed problems or patterns
• design of experiments
• data science, quantitative analysis, data visualization and interpretation (see the section on data science above)
• writing texts in a variety of genres (academic writing, technical writing, etc.)

In the last 5 years, I worked on my PhD thesis in English linguistics. My skills in regard to linguistics and language include:

• expert knowledge of phonetics and morphology, as well as excellent knowledge of other linguistic subfields
• linguistic annotation (part of speech tagging, morphological structure)
• acoustic analysis, e.g. using spectrograms
• phonetic transcription

• I am a maker and when I see things that need to get done, I do them, or make sure they get done. This characteristic transcends to many aspects of my professional and personal life. For example, in my free time, I sometimes like to create player aids for board games in InDesign, because I feel like players will benefit from those.
• I am a team player - I worked with many different teams, both as a team leader (leading a group of student assistant on annotation tasks) and as a team member (being part of a larger research unit).
• I am a very helpful person, and have a gift of recognizing when people are in need of support.
• I am skilled at teaching and presenting complex content to learners, as well as to equals and superiors.
• I am a very quick learner, and I acquired most of my coding and data science skills "learning by doing".

I speak a number of different languages to various degrees of fluency, as listed in the table below. In addition, I have structural, and in some cases limited vocabulary knowledge of Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Old English and Middle English.

• Engemann, Marie. 2022. Paradigm uniformity effects in inflectional stems: Durational differences in production and perception. düsseldorf university press.
• Engemann, Marie & Ingo Plag. 2021. Paradigm uniformity effects in spontaneous speech. The Mental Lexicon 16(1). 165–199.

• Engemann, Marie, Dominic Schmitz, Ingo Plag & Dinah Baer-Henney. 2022. Morpho-phonetic detail can be perceived: Evidence from stems and suffixes. Morphology in Production and Perception: Phonetics, Phonology and Spelling of Complex Words (MPP 2022). Düsseldorf, Germany. 7-9 February.
• Schmitz, Dominic, Marie Engemann, Ingo Plag & Dinah Baer-Henney. 2022. Subphonemic detail affects morphological processing. Morphology in Production and Perception: Phonetics, Phonology and Spelling of Complex Words (MPP 2022). Düsseldorf, Germany. 7-9 February.
• Schmitz, Dominic, Marie Engemann, Ingo Plag, & Dinah Baer-Henney. 2021. Subtle morpho-phonetic differences in English stems and word-final /s/ influence listeners’ comprehension. Words in the World International Conference 2021. 26-27 November.
• Engemann, Marie, Ingo Plag & Julia Zimmermann. 2019. Paradigmatic effects in speech production: Do bare stems influence the pronunciation of suffixed forms? MoProc 2019 - International Morphological Processing Conference. Tübingen, Germany. 4-6 November 2019.
• Engemann, Marie, Ingo Plag & Julia Zimmermann. 2019a. Morphological boundaries and stem duration in English: Paradigm uniformity effects in conversational speech. 15. Phonetik und Phonologie Tagung. Düsseldorf, Germany. 26-27 September 2019.
• Plag, Ingo, Marie Engemann & Gero Kunter. 2018. The effect of morphological boundaries on stem vowel duration in English. 40. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. Stuttgart, Germany. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. 7.-9. March 2018.
• Engemann, Marie. 2016. Exploring the Boundaries of the Address Term Mate in Australian English. Breaking Boundaries: Culture. Concepts. Constructions. (Student’s Conference Master of Arts in Comparative Studies in English and American Language, Literature and Culture). Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. 1.-2. February 2016.

• Schmitz, Dominic, Marie Engemann, Ingo Plag & Dinah Baer-Henney 2021. Are listeners sensitive to morpho-phonetic differences in English stems and word-final /s/? Poster presented at 17. Phonetik und Phonologie Tagung. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. 29-30 September 2021.
• Plag, Ingo, Marie Engemann & Julia Zimmermann. 2019. Morphological boundaries and stem duration in English: Replicating experimental results with corpus data. Poster presented at 12th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting. Ljubljana, Slovenia. 27-30. June 2019.
• Plag, Ingo, Marie Engemann & Gero Kunter. 2018. The effect of morphological boundaries on stem vowel duration in English. Poster presented at LabPhon 16 - Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology. Lisbon, Portugal. Association for Laboratory Phonology. 20.-22. June 2018.