Robert Lennon

Profile

I finished my undergraduate MA at the University of Glasgow in 2012, followed by my ESRC-funded MSc (2013) and PhD (2019), both still at Glasgow. I investigated the role of listener experience and short-term learning in the perception of an ambiguous accent feature in Glaswegian, supervised by Dr Rachel Smith and Professor Jane Stuart-Smith (thesis title: Experience and learning in cross-dialect perception: derhoticised /r/ in Glasgow).

I am now a Research Fellow on a three year Leverhulme-funded project, working with Dr Leendert Plug (Principal investigator, Leeds) and Dr Rachel Smith (Co-investigator, Glasgow), investigating how listeners perceive tempo and missing sounds in speech.

Research interests

I investigate the way in which people perceive fine phonetic differences in speech, and how this perception is conditioned by various factors. In particular, I am interested in how speech perception changes depending on a person's regional accent experience, their exposure to new accents over time, or because of small changes in the phonetic signal.

I have worked with different varieties of Scottish English - Glaswegian in particular - and my research concerns the perception of different socio-economic language varieties.

I am also interested in discovering and developing new experimental methodologies to investigate these questions. I have designed a number of experiments, each with a different methodology, and I have made use of a variety of analysis techniques to explore the resulting data.

Qualifications

• PhD English Language & Linguistics (University of Glasgow, 2019)
• MSc English Language & Linguistics (University of Glasgow, 2013)
• MA(Hons) English Language (University of Glasgow, 2012)

Professional memberships

• British Association of Academic Phoneticians

Research groups and institutes

• Formal Linguistics
• Language variation
• Speech production and perception