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Dr. JANA NEITSCH (née Schlegel)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics
Research focus on psycholinguistic topics:
hate speech, charismatic speech, emotions in language
Contact:
email: jana[at]neitsch[dot]com
Hello and welcome to my homepage!
My name is Jana Neitsch. I earned my PhD in Linguistics in 2019 at the University of Konstanz.
Personal Background:
I've always been interested in why people say certain things, or more precisely, how they say them. Why? I was born with a condition called amblyopia - a severe visual impairment that not only made binocular vision difficult for me but also made it impossible for me to see on my left eye. So, my ears tried to compensate for what I couldn't see: I learned to differentiate feelings, emotions, and the slightest changes in the mood of those around me. Through occlusion therapy until the age of 14, I also learned to see again.
Scientific Background:
Later, I learned that within linguistics, there is a discipline that can measure all these audible nuances: phonetics. That's why I became particularly interested in prosody research and the empirical investigation of the human voice. During my master's degree and my doctorate in linguistics, I developed a great interest in topics at the interface between linguistics and psychology. This includes the investigation of written and spoken hate speech and the discrimination of minorities in social media, giving charismatic (sales) presentations to convince an audience, and the expression and perception of emotions in hate speech (using human bio signals: heart rate, breathing patterns, brain activity, skin conductance response, pupillometrie), irony and rhetorical questions.