Photo: Manuel Castells
University of Navarra > Institute for Culture and Society
Principal Investigator: Bonds, Creativity and Culture Research Group
Director: Multimodal Pragmatics Lab
E-mail: iolzamor at unav dot es
I am a Senior Researcher in Language and Cognition at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (UNav), an interdisciplinary research center for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Within ICS, I am Principal Investigator of the Bonds, Creativity and Culture group.
At UNav I lead the Multimodal Pragmatics Lab (MuPra Lab) and the Knowledge Generation Project MultiDeMe to analyze the multimodal patterns for disagreement and mediation in human interaction, funded between 2023 and 2027 by the Spanish Ministry of Science and EU/FEDER Funds (PID2022-143052NB-I00). Our team in Navarra leads the National Network CoCoMInt ("Conflict communication and mediation in interaction"), which manages scientific collaboration among 11 research teams in 10 Spanish universities.
I am also a member of the Red Hen Lab, a distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication, the Pamplona node of PRESEEA, and the Iberus Action Cluster Cognition in Action (ICON).
My research focuses on figurative language, gesture, phraseology and interactional dynamics from the perspective of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and Multimodality.
Recent publications (selection of last 5 years)
Olza, I. (2025). "Modeling gestural alignment in spoken simultaneous interpreting: The role of gesture types", Parallèles, to appear.
Olza, I. (2024). "Gestural Alignment in Spoken Simultaneous Interpreting: A Mixed-Methods Approach", Languages, 9(4), 151.
González, A. M. & I. Olza (eds.) (2023). Accessing the Public Sphere: Mediation Practices in a Global World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Olza, I., V. Koller, I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, P. Pérez-Sobrino & E. Semino (2021). “The #ReframeCovid initiative: From Twitter to society via metaphor”, Metaphor and the Social World, 11(1), 98-120.
Pagán, C., J. Valenzuela, D. Alcaraz, I. Olza & M. Ramscar (2020). "Quantifying the speech-gesture relation with massive multimodal datasets: Informativity in time expressions", PLoS ONE, 15(6): e0233892. Video résumé.
Valenzuela, J., C. Pagán, I. Olza & D. Alcaraz (2020). "Gesturing in the wild: Evidence for a flexible mental timeline", Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 18(2), 289-315.