Research projects

Second dialect acquisition after regional migration in England

For my PhD project, I am examining how migration influences the acquisition of phonetic variation. I am interested in how speakers who have moved from the North West to the South of England change their accent, and their knowledge of sociolinguistic features. I am particularly interested in how sociolinguistic awareness, identity and individual differences in cognitive ability influence this process. To explore these questions, I have conducted a longitudinal study with first year undergraduate students who have moved to the South of England for university. I have also conducted two larger sample online studies, examining how accent knowledge and identity are affected by migration.

In May 2024, I gave a talk to Cambridge University Phonetics and Phonology Lab on the results of my online study on accent knowledge after migration, which showed that attention control modulates the effect of exposure in the encoding and retrieval of sociophonetic variation. You can view the slides here.

I also co-authored a paper on lifespan change, and adult acquisition of phonological variation at ICPhS 2023, which you can read here.

Pupil size as a correlate of cognitive load when listening to accented speech

Working with Scott Kunkel, Rémi Lamarque and Adam Chong, we have been interested in using changes in pupil dilation as a measure of cognitive effort, when listening to speech produced in different accents. We exposed 60 Southern British English speakers to sentences in their own accent, American English, Glaswegian English and Chinese-accented English, to examine how accent familiarity affects pupil size.

The poster I presented on this topic at LabPhon19 can be found here.

Individual differences in sociophonetic perception

For this project, I was interested in how individual differences in cognitive processing style influences the perception of changes in progress. To do this, I examined how speaker and listener factors influenced the perception of DRESS-lowering and GOOSE-fronting in Southern British English, and considered autistic-like traits as a measure of cognitive processing style. We found that listeners' integration of audiovisual information was affected by their cognitive processing style, as was their overall interpretation of the changes-in-progress.

A manuscript can be shared upon request.

Speak for Yersel

I have also been working as a research assistant at the University of Glasgow on the Speak for Yersel project, a large-scale resource for studying variation in Scots. In this role, I have been helping to process and analyse phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variation collected from across Scotland.