Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and Phonology Research Group

The phonetics and phonology research group (or 'P-group') brings together researchers who are working to understand the phonetics and/or phonology of human language. We combine a broad range of expertise and interests, ranging from acoustic and articulatory phonetics to formal phonological theory, taking in sociophonetics, phonological dialectology, speech recognition and speech synthesis, speech perception, laboratory phonology, historical phonology, and developmental phonology. 

We explore these issues from formal, experimental, and engineering perspectives, with interests in synchrony, diachrony, and acquisition. Members of the group work as individuals, in collaboration with each other, and in a number of collaborations with other researchers in Edinburgh and at other universities. 

Most members of the group are primarily affiliated with Linguistics and English Language, but others come from elsewhere at the University of Edinburgh (e.g., the Centre for Speech Technology Research and Informatics), or from Speech and Hearing Sciences at Queen Margaret University.

Meetings

The P-group normally meet (our meetings are called the 'Phonetics and Phonology Workshop', or 'P-workshop') on Fridays (but not every Friday) at 12:10pm. For more information (and/or if you'd like to be added to the P-workshop mailing list), email the organisers: Patrick Honeybone, Gilly Marchini and Ricardo Napoleão de Souza.

People

Staff working in this area include:

	Research interests
Dr Laura Arnold	Descriptive and documentary linguistics; tone, especially the tone systems of west New Guinea
Dr Peter Bell (Informatics)	Automatic speech recognition
Dr Julian Bradfield (Informatics)	Formal phonology; phonology-phonetics interface; click languages; simulations in phonology
Professor Heinz J Giegerich	Phonological and morphological theory, especially in relation to English
Dr Lauren Hall-Lew	Sociolinguistics; sociophonetics; phonetic methods; English variation and change; language and ethnicity; language and tourism
Dr Patrick Honeybone	Historical phonology; phonological theory; phonological dialectology; northern Englishes
Dr Pavel Iosad	Theoretical phonology; phonological interfaces; historical phonology; Celtic languages; Germanic languages
Professor Simon King	Speech recognition; speech synthesis
Professor Bob Ladd	Intonation and prosody (incl. phonology, phonetics, and paralinguistics); phonology-phonetics "interface" issues; language and music
Dr Catherine Lai	Speech prosody; spoken language understanding; affective computing; semantics; pragmatics; information structure
Dr Warren Maguire	Dialectology; varieties of English/Scots; phonetic and phonological variation and change
Dr Benjamin Molineaux	Prosodic structure and change; phonology and morphology of Mapudungun (isolate, Chile/Argentina); sound-to-spelling mapping, especially in Older Scots
Professor Mits Ota	First and second language acquisition; phonology
Dr Rebekka Puderbaugh	Acoustic phonetics; phonetic description of understudied languages; glottalic speech; phonation
Dr Michael Ramsammy	Experimental and theoretical phonology; phonological change; Creole Englishes; articulatory phonetics
Dr Bert Remijsen	Suprasegmental systems: how languages make use of pitch, duration, voice quality, loudness, and to some extent vowel quality
Dr Korin Richmond	Speech synthesis; articulatory data for speech technology; lexicography and pronunciation modelling
Professor Jim Scobbie (Queen Margaret University)	Socio-laboratory phonology; child speech; covert and quasi-phonemic phonological contrast; clinical phonetics; Scottish English; articulatory phonetics; ultrasound analysis of the tongue
Professor Mark Steedman (Informatics)	Computational linguistics; spoken intonation; spoken language processing
Professor Alice Turk	Speech production; speech perception; prosodic structure; timing

Postgraduates

Research postgraduates working in this area include:

You can also see what some of our recent postgraduate students worked on:

• Recently submitted PhD theses

Postgraduate Study

We welcome applications from potential postgraduates who would like to join our group:

• PhD and MSc by Research programmes 

History

Find out more about the roots of phonetics and phonology research at Edinburgh:

• History of phonetics and phonology at Edinburgh