Biography
Sarah Hawkins is Emeritus Director of Research in 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. See her personal website for more information and downloadable papers.
Current graduate students include:
- Marco Aldo Piccolino-Boniforti (PhD)
- Barry Ross (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Andrew Goldman (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Fernando Bravo (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Arild Suarez Stenberg (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Li-Ching Wang (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Jiaxi Liu (PhD) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Stephan Gericke (MPhil) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Marcus Martin (MPhil) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
- Becky Yau (MPhil) (co-supervised with Ian Cross)
