I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental Linguistics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, working within the Centre for Language Evolution Studies. My research explores the nature and origins of linguistic iconicity, the multimodality of human communication, and questions about language evolution through experimental and cross-linguistic methods.

Previously, I was a Principal Investigator and PostDoc at the Research Area 1: Laboratory Phonology, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin, where I worked on gesture-speech coordination and multimodal phonetic phenomena (project “On the FLExibility and Stability of Gesture-speecH Coordination (FLESH): Evidence from Production, Comprehension, and Imitation”). I completed my Ph.D. in General Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2022, focusing on iconicity in language and speech.

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.}