Iconicity and sound symbolism
Can the form of a word resemble its meaning? I study this across languages and cultures, through novel vocalizations, the bouba/kiki effect, ideophones and onomatopoeia.
Examples from my work
Projects & collaborations
Here’s what I actually spend my days on: the questions that keep pulling me back, the people I share them with, and a standing invitation to people who want to bring their own questions.
Research lines
Multimodality and gesture-speech coordination
How speech and gesture work together when we produce, understand, and imitate communicative signals; studied with acoustics, kinematics, and motion capture.
Examples from my work
Evolution of language
How iconicity may have helped language get off the ground in the first place, a question that runs through much of my work and that I also pursue within the Center for Language Evolution Studies in Toruń.
Examples from my work
Funded projects
FLESH – On the FLExibility and Stability of gesture-speecH coordination
2022–2025 · Principal InvestigatorAs PI, I ran this DFG-funded project on the coordination of gesture and speech, based at the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin. It was an own-position grant of €319,439, within a larger team budget of over €500,000, funded under the DFG Priority Program ViCom (Visual Communication). I co-led the work with Susanne Fuchs and Wim Pouw.
Short-term collaborations
Acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence in German and Catalan
2023–2024
A short-term collaboration funded within ViCom, with Frank Kügler and Alina Gregori (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Pilar Prieto and Paula G. Sánchez-Ramón (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona).
Eye gaze in relation to head nods and shakes in interaction
2026
A short-term collaboration funded within ViCom, with Anastasia Bauer (University of Cologne) and Susanne Fuchs (Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin).
Collaborators & networks
Over the years, I’ve built and led research teams and helped create multisite networks such as envisionBOX and the ViCom Data Network. Much of this work runs through my publications, and almost none of it is done alone; the strength lies in collaboration. Some amazing people I work with:
- Susanne Fuchs & Šárka Kadavá Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin
- Wim Pouw Tilburg University
- Bodo Winter & Marcus Perlman University of Birmingham
- Pilar Prieto Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
- Cornelia Ebert Goethe University Frankfurt
- Shigeto Kawahara Keio University
- Alexander Kilpatrick University of Aizu
- Nicolas Fay & Bradley Walker University of Western Australia
Work with me
Thinking about a thesis or a project together?
I supervise BA, MA and PhD theses, and I’m always glad to hear from people who’d like to collaborate. If you’re drawn to iconicity, sound symbolism, multimodal communication, or the evolution of language, write to me, ideally with an idea of your own. I’m just as curious about neighboring questions: phonetics, sociophonetics and sociolinguistics, and anything cross-linguistic.
For doctoral work, the best first step is a short proposal we can shape together and use for a scholarship or doctoral school application.
A few directions I’d be glad to take on
- – Sound symbolism in a language or community that hasn’t been looked at yet
- – The acoustics of meaning in non-linguistic vocalizations
- – Gesture and speech working together in everyday conversation
- – Machine-learning approaches to iconicity in the lexicon
The easiest way in is to send an email with an introduction about what interests you.