Axel Ekström

I am Associate Professor in Cognitive Science with a focus on linguistics. The core question at the heart of my research is, why and how does speech work? 

Here is a selection of projects pertaining to this question: 

1. How sound-imitative words are shaped by constraints of the human speech production apparatus and perceptual systems. 

2. The efficiency of vocal communication in humans, compared to other animals. I have studied vocal communication in, among others, non-human primates, wolves, and domestic cats. 

3. The relationship between speech production and acoustics. This work is led by Daniel Friedrichs at the Zurich Forensic Science Institute in Zürich, Switzerland. 

4. How the voice is used to transmit character traits in audiovisual media, in collaboration with Prof. Míša Hejná and the Aarhus University Centre for Voice Studies in Aarhus, Denmark. What kind of information do we as humans automatically infer from a speaker’s voice? And why do evil characters sound like smokers? 

5. Evolutionary history of the human vocal tract. With archaeologists William Snyder at the University of Cologne, Germany, Alexandros Karakostis at the University of Tübingen, Germany, Robert C. McCarthy at Benedictine University, USA, and David S. Strait at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. 

6. How infants learn to speak and discover the communicative potential of their vocal apparatus. A collaboration with Christopher Cox at the Aarhus University Centre for Interacting Minds, in Aarhus, Denmark. 

7. Software and intervention techniques for dysarthric speakers - i.e., patients who have lost speech capacity following stroke, or Parkinson’s disease. A broad collaboration that includes systems developers at Stockholm University, as well as speech and language pathology specialists at Uppsala University and Karolinska Institute, and speech and language pathologists working in regional healthcare. 

8. Various minor projects in speech and language technology. I’ve supervised seven master’s theses from the Uppsala University Master’s Program in Language Technology, several of which have resulted in publications. 

9. I’m also sometimes involved in non-linguistics projects on social cognition. These often concern the issue of how we as agents, assess information from trusted versus distrusted sources. Some collaborators on these works have been Erik J. Olsson and Andreas Stephens at the Lund University Department of Philosophy, and Melina Tsapos at Macquarie University, in Sidney, Australia. 

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I have a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Uppsala University, a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science from Lund University, and a PhD in Speech Communication from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.