Researchers
| Professor Felicity Cox is a member of the Centre for Language Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the Australian English accent and has published extensively on the phonetic characteristics of the variety with a particular focus on its history, evolution and variation. In 2018 she was awarded:
She is a member of a team of researchers from five universities who were awarded an ARC Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant in 2019 for the project AusKidTalk: An Australian Children’s Speech Corpus. She is the President of the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association. |
| My research interests are in speech acoustics and speech physiology. My main area of research is accent change and variation with particular reference to sociophonetic changes in Australian English, both current and historical. A second line of research concerns the acoustic changes that occur in speech production in situations of communicative difficulty. |
| Dr Anita Szakay is a lecturer at the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of several subfields within linguistics, such as:
The primary stream of her research program explores the cognitive processing and abstract mental representations of social and linguistic information within monolingual and bilingual populations. Her current projects include:
She also investigates the production and perception of prosodic variation in ethnic varieties of English. She is particularly interested in how variation in speech rhythm, intonation and voice quality is stored in the mind, and how listeners link indexical, prosodic, and lexical information to each other. |
| Dr Joshua Penney is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Language Sciences in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University. He is currently working on the Voices of Sydney project with ARC Future Fellow Professor Felicity Cox to explore how teenagers from diverse communities use phonetic features to express their complex sociocultural identities. His research interests are in sociophonetic variation, sound change, and voice quality/phonation, with a particular interest in the coda voicing contrast in English. |
| Dr Andy Gibson is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. His current work is on children’s speech in communities with differing levels of ethnic diversity (funded by an ARC Future Fellowship grant awarded to Felicity Cox and Jonathan Harrington). Andy’s research straddles sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on performed language (especially popular music singing) and ethnolinguistic repertoires in migrant communities. |
| Dr Louise Ratko is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Language Sciences in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University. She is currently working on the ARC Future Fellowship project "Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney" with ARC Future Fellow Professor Felicity Cox. Her current work explores how young Australians from diverse communities use voice quality to express their sociocultural identity. Louise’s research interests are in using various articulatory instruments such as Electromagnetic Articulography, ultrasound and electroglottography to explore sociophonetic variation, sound change, and how speech is stored within the brain. |
| Hannah White is a PhD candidate supervised by Professor Felicity Cox and Dr Anita Szakay at the Centre for Language Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her work, which is part of the ARC Discovery Project "Child Language, Community Diversity and the Emergence of Sound Change" awarded to Professor Felicity Cox and Professor Jonathan Harrington, focuses on the use of creaky voice phonation in speakers of Australian English. Hannah’s research interests are in sociophonetics, particularly voice quality and how speakers use it to signal aspects of their identity. |
| Timothy Shea is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Linguistics) from Macquarie University, and in 2021 was awarded a Master of Research for his thesis Fricated /t/ in Australian English: A Sociophonetic Perception Study, supervised by Professor Felicity Cox and Dr Anita Szakay. Tim’s doctoral research project, A Sociophonetic Investigation of Men’s Speech in Australian English, is supervised by Professor Cox, Dr Szakay and Dr Joshua Penney. It will examine the role played by sexual orientation and orientation towards masculinity in shaping phonetic variation in Australian English speaking men’s voices. |
| Conor Clements is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics, supervised by Professor Felicity Cox, Dr Anita Szakay and Dr Joshua Penney, who also supervised him for his Master of Research project (completed in 2022). His current doctoral research project aims to investigate speech rhythm among teenagers from diverse communities within Sydney, using data collected as part of the Voices of Sydney project. Previously, Conor's research has focused on variability of vowel durations in Australian English, again using data from the Voices of Sydney project, as well as forensic phonetics. His research interests lie primarily within sociophonetics, including ethnolectal variation and sound change in Australian English, as well as perception. |
| Linda Buckley Senior Research Officer |
