I’m a Principal Investigator and a PostDoc at the Research Area 1: Laboratory Phonology, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin. Currently, I’m co-leading a project “On the FLExibility and Stability of Gesture-speecH Coordination (FLESH): Evidence from Production, Comprehension, and Imitation”, funded within the DFG Priority Programme Visual Communication. This project is a collaboration with Susanne Fuchs, Wim Pouw, and Šárka Kadavá.

I’m a phonetician by training and passion. My research primarily focuses on exploring iconicity in language across various levels, with a special emphasis on spoken language. This research spans acoustic and prosodic aspects, as well as sound symbolism. Additionally, I delve into the kinematic properties and multimodality of communication.

I completed my Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2022. My thesis “Iconicity in Language and Speech” was supervised by Manfred Krifka, Susanne Fuchs, and Marcus Perlman.

I’m one of the initiators of the envisionBOX, a platform for learners and creators working with multimodal data.

Why some people call me Ola [ɔla]

I come from Poland, and in Poland, the short version of the name Aleksandra is Ola. I don’t know why, but I like to consider the Polish vowel system when thinking about this. You see, we only have six vowels in Polish: [a ɛ i ɨ u ɔ], written as <a e i y u o>. Alicja is Ala, Elżbieta is Ela, Urszula is Ula… Ask any Polish native speaker and they will most likely tell you that Ila and Yla feel weird. So, Ola it was. That’s how the convention was made.

Mateusz Adamczyk comes with a scientific explanation (also see this post). At some point, through language contact with Ukrainian and Russian, Oleksandra emerged as a version of Aleksandra. Later, Oleksandra disappeared from Polish, and the short form of the name, i.e., Ola, was attached to the remaining original Aleksandra.

^{Photo by Stefanie Wetzel, made for SPP ViCom.}