Dr Roy Alderton

Overview

Roy Alderton is a Lecturer in Phonetics in the Department of Language and Communication Science at City, University of London. His primary expertise is in sociophonetics, but his research interests span a range of topics in phonetics, sociolinguistics, varieties of English and quantitative methods more broadly.

Roy completed his PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University in 2019, where he investigated the production and perception of sociophonetic variation among secondary school pupils in Hampshire, South East England. He examined how the social meanings of two phonetic variables were constructed and perceived in relation to macro-level social stratification in the community (e.g. gender and social class), as well as micro-level categories such as between friendship groups at school and between state and private-school students.

In 2021-22, Roy worked as a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-DFG-funded project 'Speakers, listeners, languages: Variability and contrast in spoken language dynamics' at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in collaboration with researchers at University College London and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project used articulatory and acoustic analyses of lip rounding and nasal amplitude to examine inter-speaker and cross-linguistic variation in coarticulation in American English, French and German.

Roy is currently applying machine learning techniques to speech data to identify patterns of sociophonetic variation from vowel formants using a bottom-up, data-driven approach.

Roy is happy to receive proposals for research projects relating to his research interests above, particularly those involving social class and stratification, the speech of adolescents, and data science methods such as mixed-effects modelling and machine learning.

Employment

• Lecturer in Phonetics, City, University of London, United Kingdom, January 2023 - present

Administrative roles

• Programme Director for MSc Speech and Language Therapy, September 2023 - present
• BSc Admissions Tutor, January 2023 - September 2024

Publications by category