Prof Sarah Hawkins

Sarah Hawkins is Emeritus Professor of Speech and Music Science and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. She has broad interests in how humans communicate using sound-based systems. Her particular specialism is in the acoustics and perception of speech. Her early research studied timing and rhythm in children’s speech, subsequently turning to exploration of subtle differences in acoustic-phonetic patterns that systematically reflect distinctions in linguistic structure, and of how listeners use these subtle cues to understand natural and synthetic speech (‘Roles and representations of systematic fine phonetic detail in speech understanding’, Journal of Phonetics, 31, (2003) 373-405, and 32 (2004) 141). These interests have been extended to the study of musical interaction and performance, as well as speech. These developments were encouraged by research undertaken during a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2003-2006), The development of a phonetically-rich model of speech understanding, which extended the neuropsychological and computational directions of her work on multi-modal representation of speech and meaning in memory (‘Phonological features, auditory objects, and illusions’, Journal of Phonetics, 38, (2010), 60-89). She coordinated Sound to Sense (S2S), an EC Marie Curie Research Training Network 2007-11. She has a number of national and international collaborations and service positions, including Associate Editor of Phonetica.