Dr Leendert Plug awarded a Leverhulme Trust Grant

Dr Leendert Plug awarded a Leverhulme Trust Grant

Dr Plug's successful research grant award will support the ‘Speech Tempo Perception and Missing Sounds’ project.

Dr Leendert Plug has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant of approximately £190,000 to support the three-year project ‘Speech Tempo Perception and Missing Sounds’. The project continues Leendert’s research collaboration with Dr Rachel Smith (University of Glasgow), which is currently supported by a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Small Grant.

Leendert and Rachel will be running experiments to probe factors that may influence how listeners estimate the tempo of utterances, including the apparent non-pronunciation of sounds in casual speech. The research will hopefully lead to recommendations as to how to measure speech tempo for a range of purposes.