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Robert Lennon

Robert Lennon

  • Position: Research Fellow in Phonetics
  • Areas of expertise: sociophonetics; speech perception; perceptual adaptation; rhoticity; phonetics of Scottish English varieties; phonetic variation and social class; speech tempo perception; experimental methodologies
  • Email: R.W.Lennon@leeds.ac.uk
  • Website: | Twitter | LinkedIn | Researchgate | ORCID

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.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

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