Research in Linguistic Phonetics
- Activities
- Staff members
- Facilities
If you are interested in doing graduate research in linguistic phonetics in the department, please contact John Wells.
Activities
We endeavour to continue the tradition of research and description established by Daniel Jones and, following him, A.C. Gimson. Our research in linguistic phonetics includes the following areas:
- English phonetics
- Redefining RP - what are the characteristics of contemporary standard English pronunciation in England?
- Connected speech phenomena - how is the pronunciation of English words modified in authentic running speech?
- Stressing and accentuation - irregularity and idiomaticity
- Intonation - the new high-rise nucleus ('upspeak')
- L2 and interlanguage - what are the phonetic characteristics of learner's English, and how are they to be explained?
- pronunciation preferences - how do people's preferences for words of disputed pronunciation change over time?
- General phonetics
- Voice quality across languages - are different languages typically spoken with different voice qualities?
Staff
Research work in linguistic phonetics is conducted by
with the assistance of graduate research students.
Facilities
The Department has very good facilities for conducting research in linguistic phonetics, including:
- a Listening Centre equipped with .... (Evelyn?)
- an anechoic chamber for recording very high quality speech signals.
- facilities for multi-channel recording, including laryngographic analysis.
- networked Sun SPARC workstations and PCs running in-house (SFS) and commercial signal processing software (ESPS).
- access to standard speech and language corpora