Language and linguistic research
Overview
We ranked second in the UK for linguistic research in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, with two-thirds of our research judged to be world-leading or internationally excellent.
Our distinctive focus is on the integration of theoretical and empirical investigation of the formal properties, development, use and evolution of linguistic systems. Much of our work is cross-disciplinary and collaborative, involving many national and international partners. We are also involved in several applied fields with partners outside academia.
Research areas
The department engages in a wide range of research in five main areas:
- Acquisition/Psycholinguistics
- Forensic speech science
- Language variation & change
- Phonetics and phonology
- Syntax and semantics
Research community
Current research
- Marie Curie FP7 Network BBfor2
Researching speaker recognition (comparison), face recognition, and fingerprint recognition, including:- Multimodal speech and speaker recognition
- Calculation of likelihood ratios using phonetic and linguistic features
- Schwa project
The project will establish the inter- and intra- speaker variability of word-final schwa in varieties of English and German.