Professor Elinor Payne

Professor of Phonetics and Phonology Fellow of St Hilda's College College Lecturer at Oriel College
Address:	Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JF, United Kingdom
Email:	takes the form firstname.surname@phon.ox.ac.uk

Research

My overarching research interest is in speech variation - how it arises, what shapes it and how speakers use it - and its relationship to phonological structure. Within this framework, I've worked on aspects of timing in speech (including lexical and postlexical gemination, prosodic timing and speech rhythm), and on other aspects of prosody, for a range of languages, including infants' acquisition of these.

My current research investigates prosodic and phonetic variation and convergence arising from historic and contempory multilingualism and linguistic contact. I also work on the effects of speech context on prosody, and, more recently, on its interaction with gesture in a multimodal framework.

Current projects

• Mapping Cypriot Prosody: a geo-historical acoustic investigation of the effects of insularity at a linguistic crossroads: Investigating the effects of historic contact on the prosody of Cypriot varieties of Greek Turkish and Arabic, and mapping patterns of convergence on a digital online atlas. Funded by Oxford University's John Fell Fund (PI: Elinor Payne)
• Contact phonetics and prosody: Indian English in India and the diaspora: Investigating variation and change in the phonetics and prosody of Indian English, including transfer effects from Indian L1s and accent-contact arising from domestic and international migration. Funded by a Leverhulme International Research Fellowship (PI: Elinor Payne); Australian Research Council (PI: Olga Maxwell); and Oxford University's John Fell Fund (PI: Elinor Payne)
• The prosody and phonetics of Venetan dialect and regional Italian: a cross-generation investigation of the intonational prosody of a rural Venetan dialect and its influence on dialectophones' Italian. Funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (PI: Elinor Payne)
• World Futures: Multimodal Viewpoint Construction by Russian International Media: an interdisciplinary investigation of the construction and meaning of multimodal communication, drawing on cognitive and corpus-driven analyses of language, prosody, and gesture, combined with Area Studies and the latest developments in machine learning, natural language-processing and computer vision. Funded by the AHRC and DFD (PIs: Anna Wilson, Peter Ulhrig)

Other recent projects

• The Acquisition of Consonant Timing (ACT): Investigating how children acquire the prosodic-phonetic biases of consonant timing and cluster production of their ambient language (English and Norwegian).
• Acquisition of Prosody in L1 (APriL): Investigating the acquisition of rhythm and intonation in Catalan, Spanish and English.

Teaching

From October 2021 I shall be on research leave for two years, so I shall not be teaching during this period (except for doctoral research students).

Research supervision

I supervise doctoral and Masters students in topics related to speech prosody, phonetic variation, and contact phonetics. I will be taking new students from October 2023 onwards.