Rachel Smith, BA, MPhil, PhD
RCUK Fellow
- Experimental phonetics and phonology
- Speech perception
- Sociophonetics
Room 6, 12 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 5533
e-mail: R.Smith@englang.arts.gla.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Rachel Smith is a Research Councils UK (RCUK) Academic Fellow in Sociophonetics. She previously held a temporary Lectureship in Phonetics at the University of Cambridge (2003-6).
Her teaching interests are in phonetics, speech perception, psycholinguistics, research methods and statistics.
Her research interests are in speech perception, phonetics (acoustic, linguistic and social), and psycholinguistics. Her doctoral dissertation was on the role of fine phonetic detail in word segmentation. Current research projects concern how people learn to perceive new voices and accents; the phonetics of reduced discourse markers in Dutch (with Mirjam Ernestus, Radboud University Nijmegen); and perception of phonetic cues to morphological structure (with Rachel Baker and Sarah Hawkins, University of Cambridge). She works within and has contributed to a theoretical approach to speech perception, Polysp (developed by Sarah Hawkins, University of Cambridge) which is informed by Firthian prosodic analysis, and emphasises how the fine phonetic details of speech inform listeners simultaneously about the linguistic message, the speaker’s personal and social attributes, and the interpersonal interaction that is unfolding.
She has supervised at masters level and currently supervises at doctoral level in phonetics and speech perception. She is available to supervise postgraduates in a range of areas within phonetics, especially experimental phonetics and speech perception.