Robin J Lickley

Biography

Following my MA in Linguistics at Edinburgh University, I spent 3 years in Italy teaching English, before returning to Edinburgh for my PhD. I worked with Dr Ellen Gurman Bard and Dr Richard Shillcock on a study examining when and how people are able to detect that disfluency is present in speech. During this time, I was also employed for two years at the Centre for Speech Technology Research. On completion of my PhD, Detecting Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech, I spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, with Dr Hugo Quené and Professor Sieb Nooteboom. I returned to the Human Communication Research Centre at Edinburgh University, where, with Dr Gurman Bard, I received 5 years of funding from the ESRC and EPSRC in work that involved annotating the HCRC Map Task corpus for disfluencies and using samples of the corpus to test listeners’ ability to detect, and their tendency to miss, disfluencies in running speech. We also compared human and computer performance in understanding disfluent speech. I also spent 6 weeks with British Telecom as a visiting research fellow, analyzing disfluency in recordings of telephone speech. As a Senior Research Fellow at Edinburgh University, I also worked with Professor Bob Ladd and Dr Astrid Schepmann on prosodic analysis of spontaneous Dutch speech. In 2001, I took up a lectureship at Queen Margaret University.

Research Interest

Spontaneous speech, with its frequent errors and hesitations, gives us great insight into the mechanisms behind its production.