Dr Leendert Plug

Profile

I came to Leeds in 2007, after doing an MA and PhD at the University of York and working at the University of Sheffield. My first degree was an MA in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands). I have been an Associate Professor since 2012, and was Director of Linguistics and Phonetics between 2015 and 2022, minus a year's research leave in 2018-19. 

Research interests

My research interests are in phonetics, speech perception, laboratory phonology and interactional linguistics. Most of my research has focused on phonetic reduction and disfluency in connected speech, the perception of speech tempo and rhythm, and the temporal organisation of consonant sequences. I have worked mainly on Dutch, English and Arabic. My current research focuses on within-speaker variation in speech production. It has been supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant (How variable is speech, how reliable are single recordings?, 2022-2024) which has allowed me to record the Leeds Multi-Session Corpus of Standard Southern British English (https://doi.org/10.5518/1547). Previously I was Principal Investigator on Prosodic marking revisited: The phonetics of self-initiated self-repair in Dutch (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council), Syllables, segments and how to measure speech tempo: Evidence from listening experiments (funded by the British Academy) and Speech tempo perception and missing sounds (funded by the Leverhulme Trust).

Professional memberships

• British Association of Academic Phoneticians
• International Phonetic Association
• Journal of Phonetics (editorial board)
• Studies in Phonetics and Phonology (editorial board)

Student education

At Leeds most of my teaching is in the areas of phonetics and phonology and interactional linguistics. I also do my share of convening team-taught modules and teaching academic skills and research methods. I am currently writing a textbook entitled Foundations of Phonetics and Phonology.

Research groups and institutes

• Formal Linguistics
• Language variation
• Speech production and perception

Current postgraduate researchers

• Eskarina Yeates