Funding Success: Speech tempo perception and missing sounds

Congratulations to Dr Leendert Plug, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant of about £190,000 to support the three-year project ‘Speech tempo perception and missing sounds’. The project continues Leendert’s research collaboration with Dr Rachel Smith (University of Glasgow), which is currently supported by a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Small Grant. Leendert and Rachel will be running experiments to probe factors that may influence how listeners estimate the tempo of utterances, including the apparent non-pronunciation of sounds in casual speech. If all goes well, the research will lead to recommendations as to how to measure speech tempo for a range of purposes.