research interests


My special focus is on topics and phenomena at the interface between linguistics (phonetics and phonology) and psychology.

 

Postdoctoral Researcher:

  • Since January 2021, I am  working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Linguistics/Anglistics (IfLA) at the University of Stuttgart. I am involved in the writing process of a CRC and together with Prof. Dr. Judith Tonhauser I am working on the prosodic and semantic aspects of irony and emotions.
  • In my project in Denmark, we investigated the realisation and perception of both written and spoken hate speech on social media platforms in German and Danish. We focused on the psycho-acoustic aspects of sound signals, noise perception, and digital communication. This enables me to conduct physiological measurements (breathing patterns, skin conductance response, EEG, heart rate, ...) and to analyse participants' stress level if they are presented with hate speech. 

PhD:

  • My research focuses on fine phonetic details of the production of rhetorical questions in different contexts and whether the perception of specific cues (identified on the basis of speech production) are associated with a rhetorical illocution, such as voice quality.
  • Since I consider rhetorical questions as a context-dependent, emotionally loaded and sarcastic phenomenon, I am interested in how specific prosodic characteristics change in different contexts. In this regard, it is not only interesting to focus on the interplay between characteristics such as voice quality, pitch accent type and duration, but also on context as an influencing parameter.
  • I am very much into rhetorical questions as an emotionally loaded and context dependent phenomenon, sarcasm and irony. For my research, I use Eye Tracking (Experiment Builder, EyeLink 1000 Plus), forced choice perception tasks, judgement tasks, and I conducted and analysed numerous production experiments.