Laurence White

The work of my research group relates to how people perceive and produce speech, particularly in conversational interactions. A key focus is prosody, “the music of speech.” For example, we investigate how variations in melody, rhythm and timing direct listeners to the boundaries between words in the ongoing flow of speech sounds, or help talkers to fluent regulate conversational turn-taking. Another longstanding project aims to characterise systematic prosodic differences between languages, asking whether such differences are informative about the challenges of learning an unfamiliar language as an adult.

In recent studies, we have examined social and emotional interpretations of speech prosody, and other vocal markers of identity, such as regional and second language accents. Ongoing work investigates how the speech prosody of people with depression changes over the course of therapy, asking if the dynamic interplay of patients’ and therapists’ vocal features may reflect the formation and maintenance of positive therapeutic alliances.

I am a Reader in Speech Science in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. With an academic background in psychology and linguistics, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Experimental Psychology at Bristol University and then at SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) Trieste, before taking up a lecturing position in Psychology at Plymouth University. I joined Speech and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in 2018.