People

Chris is an Associate Professor in Speech Science at SHaPS. His research involves using an array of state-of-the-art experimental technologies to investigate how speakers coordinate vocal tract articulators to produce speech sounds, how this shaping of the vocal tract affects the acoustic output, and how these acoustic changes are perceived by listeners. He is also interested in speech modelling using machine learning techniques.

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Taka is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in SHaPS for the Leverhulme-funded project “Speech production processes in resolving articulatory variation” with Professor Patti Adank, Dr Chris Carignan, and Professor Adamantious Gafos (University of Potsdam, Germany). 

His research interests broadly lie in foreign accents in second language (L2) speech production. In his PhD research at Lancaster University, he used ultrasound tongue imaging to investigate from articulatory/dynamic perspectives why English /l/ and /r/ sounds are difficult for L1 Japanese speakers to produce.

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Justin was a postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Patterns of variability and contrast in spoken language dynamics project during 2021-2023, and is currently a Lecturer in Security and Protection Science at Lancaster University. He has broad research interests in the areas of phonetics and sociolinguistics, but is particularly interested in the interaction of language- and speaker-specificity in bilingual speech production and its relevance for forensic speech science. He completed his PhD in Linguistics at the University of York, with a focus on issues of bilingualism in likelihood ratio-based forensic voice comparison.

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Zirui was a PhD student at SHaPS during 2019-2023, and is current an AI Engineer at IQVIA. She is particularly passionate about using state-of-the-art methods such as deep learning and computational modelling. These techniques are used to investigate the articulatory coordination of speech, and the relationship between acoustics and articulation. She is also interested in speech technology in general such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).

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Bilal was a visiting PhD researcher from Newcastle University during 2022, learning about real-time MRI data collection and processing.