Hello and welcome to my homepage!

My name is Jana Neitsch and I earned my PhD in general linguistics at the University of Konstanz in 2019 with special focus on phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. My three main areas of interest are: rhetorical questions and irony, hate speech, and charismatic speech. 

In my PhD thesis, I investigated the psychoacoustic characteristics of rhetorical questions compared to string-identical information-seeking questions in German in production and perception. I also interested in different types of (spoken and written) hate speech and how they influence the recipients' bio signals in terms of physiological reactions (e.g., heart rate, breathing patterns, brain activity, skin conductance response, pupillometrie). Another aspect of my research focuses on the investigation of the prosodic characteristics of charismatic speech in oral presentations. Recently, we investigated rhetorical questions as a rhetoric device in sales presentations and how charismatic the presenters and the products were perceived by the listeners.