Margaret E. L. Renwick

On leave during Academic Year 2024-25

I study spoken language in order to improve our models of speech from both the speaker’s and the listener’s point of view. My research projects are rooted in the tradition of laboratory phonology, an approach which integrates experimental methods with more abstract linguistic representations of sound structure. I apply phonetic methodologies to gain insight on topics such as the nature of phonological contrast, the realization of phonological rules in everyday speech, the origins of phonological alternations, and the role of phonotactics in speech production and perception.

My recent projects include: the acoustics of speech in the Southern United States; the phonetics & phonology of vowels in Romanian; variation in the vowels of Italian and Catalan; Big Data analyses of the acoustics of (British) English consonants, in collaboration with the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Oxford; speech rhythm.