Professor Bodo Winter

Department of Linguistics and Communication
Professor of Linguistics

Contact details

Email: b.winter@bham.ac.uk
Twitter: @BodoWinter

Address: Frankland Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I am a Professor of 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.

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 2024, 'Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English', Cognitive Science, vol. 48, no. 6, e13471. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13471

Watkins, F, Abdlkarim, D, Winter, B & Thompson, RL 2024, 'Viewing angle matters in British Sign Language processing', Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, 1043. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-51330-1

Winter, B 2023, 'Abstract concepts and emotion: Cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, vol. 378, 20210368. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0368

Brown, L, Kim, H, Hübscher, I & Winter, B 2023, 'Gestures are modulated by social context: A study of multimodal politeness across two cultures', Gesture. https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.20034.bro

Winter, B, Perlman, M, Lupyan, G, Perry, L & Dingemanse, M 2023, 'Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words', Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02112-6

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

Winter, B, Fischer, M, Myachykov, A & Scheepers, C 2023, 'More is better: English language statistics are biased towards addition', Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 4, e13254. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13254

Winter, B & Strik Lievers, F 2023, 'Semantic distance predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments in synesthetic metaphors', Metaphor and the Social World, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 59-80. https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.00029.win

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

Chapter

Winter, B & Perek, F 2023, Cognitive linguistics. in L Wei, Z Hua & J Simpson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics: Volume One. 2nd edn, Routledge handbooks in applied linguistics, Routledge, London, pp. 309-321. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003082644-26

Review article

Winter, B & Marghetis, T 2023, 'Multimodality matters in numerical communication', Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, 1130777. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1130777

View all publications in research portal