Projects

Linguistic diversity and accent bias in Higher Education and beyond.

Dates: 2023-2024 Funding: Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship Summary: This project aims to develop sustainable initiatives to celebrate linguistic diversity and tackle accent-based inequalities in different sectors, starting from Higher Education. Initiatives include a University-wide survey of university students' experiences of accent-based disadvantages, and developing context-specific solutions in partnership with the Leeds University Union (LUU), EDI teams, and Higher Education institutions.

The phonetics and phonology of Modern South Arabian: Mehri and Shehret.

Dates: 2019-2022 Principal Investigator: Janet Watson (University of Leeds) Collaborators: Barry Heselwood (University of Leeds) and Abdullah Musallam al-Mahri Funding: Leverhulme Trust Summary: This project investigates the the sound systems of Mehri and Shehret, two endangered Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) spoken in Southern Arabia.

The role of regional variation in speech processing.

Dates: 2018-2022 Collaborators: Robert Lennon (Lancaster University) and Bronwen G. Evans (UCL). Funding: School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds. Summary: This project uses eye-tracking to investigate how information about the speakers’ accent influences the time course of spoken word recognition.

The role of social factors in bilingual speech processing: the case of Galician New Speakers.

Dates: 2013-2021 Collaborators: Bronwen G. Evans (UCL), Robert Mayr (Cardiff Metropolitan University) Summary: This project uses phonetic methods, perception tasks and eye-tracking to investigate Galician-Spanish bilinguals' speech production and perception, with a focus on Galician new speakers (neofalantes).