Current projects
Voices of Sydney
Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Yet the complex relationship between how we speak and cultural diversity is not known for 21st century multicultural Australia. This Australian Research Council funded project aims to help us understand the characteristics of spoken language used by Sydney adolescents from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The project will inform theories of language variation, ethnicity, and identity, and help to provide a framework for supporting sociocultural cohesion in Australia.
Children's speech, community diversity and the emergence of sound change
This project aims to explain how children's speech processing adapts to cultural and linguistic diversity and how such adaptation may seed sound change in language. Using rigorous acoustic and articulatory (ultrasound) methods, the project intends to explain how children rapidly and authentically acquire the intricately nuanced accents of their communities. One of the major goals is to advance theories of language variation and change by providing new insights into the forces that shape the sounds of language. An understanding of how children's speech patterns develop and ultimately converge to local norms has implications for the social integration of second language learning children, refugee/asylum seekers, and clinical populations.
Voices of Australia
The Australian accent is known for being quite uniform despite the size of the land in which it is spoken. In Australia, there is not a lot of regionally-based accent variation compared with most other world Englishes; however, there are lots of vocabulary differences.
Nevertheless, many Aussies swear they can spot a Queenslander or a South Australian as soon as they open their mouth! Indeed, previous research has identified variation in Australian English speech production according to a number of social factors, including a few regionally-distributed phonetic features. In some cases, sociophonetic variation may even be present in different locations within the same urban area, which may index some form of local identity, or other social factors such as community diversity.
In this project, we plan to record the voices of speakers from all across the nation, to provide an accurate picture of the variation that exists in the contemporary Australian accent and how this variation is linked to region. If you'd like to take part in the project and have your voice recorded, please sign up here.
AusKidTalk 
The AusKidTalk project aims to create a large database of Australian children's speech for use in the development of automatic speech recognition systems, providing an essential resource for building apps for education, speech therapy, and pronunciation coaching for children learning to speak English. The database includes typically developing and disordered speech with the hope that speech recognition systems can be taught to understand voice commands from children with impaired speech. Read more about AusKidTalk here.