Postdoctoral Research Fellow connected to "ICONIC" (277523) | University of Oslo

About the position 

A 3-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (SKO 1352) connected to the NFR-funded research project  ICONIC - The Emergence and Stabilisation of Iconicity in Human Speech  is available at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo.

ICONIC aims at understanding how iconicity, i.e. the perceived resemblance of form and meaning of words, evolves through cultural evolution over time. The project uses a combination of iterated learning experiments, acoustic analyses and iconicity rating experiments. Acoustic recordings of individual speech transmission outcomes allow us to measure which combinations of acoustic features speakers use to express size-based iconic relationships, including acoustic dimensions such as vowel quality, voice quality, and pitch. After defining the acoustic profile of iconicity, ICONIC will explore and quantify the (in)stability of iconic form-meaning pairs across generations to experimentally probe the hypothesis that iconic form-meaning pairs are robust to change. This empirical approach will not only shed new light on the evolution of words, but it will also serve as the first proof of concept of how we can harness experimental innovations to explore questions related to sound change in the laboratory.

The ICONIC team is led by Professor Timo B. Roettger and will be comprised of one postdoctoral fellow (3 years), one PhD student (3 years), and two research affiliates from the University of Birmingham (Dr. Marcus Perlman and Dr. Bodo Winter).

All project activities will be conducted in English. 

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