Themes
My research interests span a range of topics within psycholinguistics, mainly using experimental methods including both behavioural and neurological methods. My main focus is on the study of speech sounds, in particular speech perception, from a variety of intersecting perspectives, including:
- Auditory processing and linguistic experience, e.g., categorisation.
- The relationship between acoustics and higher-level mental representation, e.g., acoustic-phonetic mapping, emotion recognition etc.
- Learning mechanisms, e.g., statistical learning.
- Language acquisition, including L1 and L2 acquisition.
Current projects
This project demonstrates that audio-based gamified tasks (e.g., points, leaderboards, and rewards) can effectively replace traditional incentives in phonetic perception research, showing that North East England listeners struggle to accurately distinguish local dialects despite strong folk beliefs about fine-grained regional differences.
Past projects
The Many Speech Analyses project set out to quantify the analytic flexibility in the speech sciences and explored how it affects our scientific conclusions. To that end, the main organisers asked speech researchers to analyse the same data set in order to answer the same research question.