Dr Gisela Tomé Lourido

Profile

I joined the Universtiy of Leeds in 2017 after completing an MA in Phonetics and a PhD in Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences at University College London (UCL). Before specialising in Phonetics I obtained an undergraduate degree in English Studies (Filoloxía Inglesa) and an MA in Education (Mestrado Universitario de Profesorado) at Universidade da Coruña, in Galicia. 

Responsibilities

• Director of Language@Leeds
• LCS Ethics Lead

Research interests

My research interests are in accent variation (speech production and perception) and accent bias in bilingual and monolingual populations. With Dr Milena Marinkova, I co-lead the Embracing Linguistic Diversity satellite, a working group developing a series of initiatives to celebrate linguistic diversity and minimise language-based prejudices and disadvantages, starting from our University context.

I welcome PhD applications on accent bias and inequalities, the role of accent variation in speech processing in first L1) and second (L2) listeners, Galician speech production and perception.

Current and Past Research Projects:

• Linguistic diversity and accent bias in Higher Education and beyond (2023-2024), funded by the Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship. This project aims to develop collaborative initiatives to tackle accent-based inequalities, starting from the Higher Education sector. These include an Accent Equality Statement co-created with academics in the Embracing Linguistic Diversity satellite, students and LUU representatives, to raise awareness of accent bias in Higher Education. 
• I am a co-onvestigator in The phonetics and phonology of Modern South Arabian: Mehri and Shehret (2019-2022), led by Prof Janet Watson and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Other collaborators: Dr Barry Heselwood and Abdullah Musallam al-Mahri.
• The role of regional variation in speech processing (2018-2022). In collaboration with Dr Robert Lennon (Lancaster Unversity) and Dr Bronwen Evans (UCL). 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 (2013-2021): This project used phonetic methods, perception tasks and eye-tracking to investigate Galician-Spanish bilinguals' speech production and perception, with a focus on Galician new speakers (neofalantes). Most of this work was conducted during my PhD thesis, supervised by Dr Bronwen Evans (UCL) and Prof Valerie Hazan (UCL). A related project on the role of early exposure and continued language use in bilingual speech production was conducted in collaboration with Dr Robert Mayr (Cardiff Metropolitan University), Laura López Bueno and Martín Vázquez Fernández.

• Linguistic diversity and accent bias in Higher Education and beyond

Qualifications

• PhD Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
• MA Phonetics
• Postgraduate Certificate in Education
• BA English Studies

Student education

I teach modules in phonetics and sociophonetics on our undergraduate and MA programmes. 

Research groups and institutes

• Formal Linguistics
• Language acquisition
• Language processing
• Language variation
• Speech production and perception
• Multilingualism
• Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems
• Language at Leeds
• Linguistics and Phonetics
• Languages
• Language documentation
• Linguistics and Phonetics
• Linguistics and Translation
• Network for Hispanic and Lusophone Cultural Studies

Current postgraduate researchers

• Eskarina Yeates
• Hammal Al Balushi