"Steph" or "stiff": factors influencing speech comprehension in the face of variation

Speech is an infinitely variable source of information, and listeners must constantly work to decode signals from a range of different speakers. Despite this challenge, speech comprehension is usually successful. Listeners must therefore maintain phonological categories which are flexible enough to accommodate substantial variation. My research looks at the factors that facilitate or impede this flexibility, specifically focusing on vowel categories, which are known to be particularly accepting of variant forms. I will present an overview of this area, with reference to behavioural and neural evidence from my PhD experimental work.

Steph Cooper is a fourth-year PhD student in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She is originally from Auckland, New Zealand, and when she arrived in the UK to pursue an MSc in Language Acquisition and Development at Bangor University, she was struck by how many people found her accent difficult to understand. This, combined with her background in cognitive psychology, inspired her focus on accent and variation perception. She mostly works with New Zealand English and Standard Southern British English-speaking populations, doing behavioural and neural experiments to examine how they decode their own and each other’s accents.