Information for Prospective PhD students

My Research

I'm interested in supervising PhDs investigating the production and comprehension of human speech, including what errors in speech can tell us about the way it is produced, what causes people to be disfluent and how disfluency affects comprehension, and what underlies longer-term difficulties with speech, such as stuttering.

I work closely with a number of researchers in Edinburgh and further afield: For a flavour of what we do, see our research group's wiki, the EDG wiki. You might be particularly interested in some recent PhD theses and other publications which you can find on this page. (You can see a full list of my publications here).

Who I'm Looking For

Ideally, you'll have a strong background in language, psychology, or both: For example, you might have a degree, or be about to graduate, in Linguistics, Foreign Languages, Cognitive Science, Speech Therapy, or any other subject related to psychology and/or language. Depending on your background I might recommend you take the Masters in Psychology of Language before starting on your PhD (this is the standard route in Edinburgh), but I'm interested in hearing from you as early as possible in the process.

Much of the research that I do is fairly high-tech: Among other techniques, we use eyetracking and event-related potentials (ERP) in comprehension studies, and electropalatography (EPG) and ultrasound imaging in production studies. This means that these projects tend to suit people who are happy with machines and numbers, and with fairly complicated statistics.

PhD students I have supervised in the past include Tracy Alloway, Corey McMillan, Lucy MacGregor, Phil Collard, and Heidi Stieglitz Ham. You can find some of their dissertations on the EDG wiki.

Specific Information

Together with David Donaldson at Stirling University, I am offering a studentship starting in September 2010 using ERP methods to examine people's understanding of, and memory for, spoken words. This studentship is funded by SINAPSE. It would suit someone with reasonably strong statistical skills. A background in either Psycholinguistics or ERP would be an asset. This studentship has now been filled.

I am also looking for students for other projects, although I don't currently have specific funding to offer; prospective students would be expected to apply for their own funding, with my help. In the past my students have managed to obtain funding from ESRC, NIH, the British Council, ORSAS, and the University of Edinburgh.

The University of Edinburgh's Postgraduate Pages give information about funding, costs, visas, the application process, and much more.

What Next?

If you think you might be interested in pursuing a PhD in the areas described above, please feel free to to talk about it.