Professor Bill Wells, MA (Oxon), DPhil (York), Dip RSA, Hon FRCSLT.
Department of Human Communication Sciences
University of Sheffield
31 Claremont Crescent
Sheffield
S10 2TA
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 2429
Fax: +44 (0) 114 273 0547
email : bill.wells@sheffield.ac.uk
Research Interests
Typical and atypical speech development in children:
- intonation
- linguistic, psycholinguistic and interactional approaches
- connected speech features
- regional accents
- assessment of speech difficulties across languages
Phonetics of talk-in-interaction:
- in children’s development and across different languages
- turn-organisation; overlapping talk; alignment
Current projects
- Phonetic design of overlapping speech in talk-in-interaction: A cross-linguistic study. Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. £169,654. With Dr Guy Brown, (Department of Computer Science). Research associate: Emina Kurtic. http://overlap.rcweb.dcs.shef.ac.uk/ 2008-12
- Sound to Sense: Marie Curie Research Training Network in Fine Phonetic Detail (Senior Scientist). Research fellow: Jan Gorisch. Lead supervisor: Dr Guy Brown (Department of Computer Science). http://www.sound2sense.eu/ 2007-11
- PIPIN: Promoting independence through personalised interactive technologies UoS Digital World PhD network. PhD student: Inigo Casanueva; Lead supervisor: Prof Phil Green (Department of Computer Science). http://pipin.group.shef.ac.uk/ 2011-14
- Diagnostic Classification of Children’s Speech and Spelling Difficulties. Faculty research
grant. PI : Prof Joy Stackhouse. RA: Joy Newbold. 2011-12
Current PhD Students
Baharak Baranian Speech assessment of Farsi-speaking children with cleft palate
Jan Gorisch Prosodic matching and interactional alignment
Joy Newbold Measurement of children’s speech development
Eleftheria Geronikou Phonological and morphological development in Greek children
Inigo Casanueva Interaction with PALS (Personal Adaptive Listening Systems)
A Mekonnen Speech production in Amharic speaking children with repaired cleft palate
Nisreen Al-Awaji Speech assessment of Saudi Arabic speaking children with cleft palate
Recent publications
Kurtic, E, Brown, G & Wells, B. (2013) Resources for turn-competition in overlapping talk. Speech
Communication 55.
Gorisch, J, Wells, B & Brown G. (2012) Pitch contour matching and interactional alignment: An acoustic investigation. Language and Speech. 55, 57-76
Tempest, A & Wells, B (2012). Alliances and arguments: A case study of a child with persisting
speech difficulties in peer play. Child Language Teaching and Therapy. 28 , 57-72
Newbold, E.J., Howard, S & Wells, B. (2011) Phonetic and interactional aspects of repair in the
peer talk of six year old boys. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 25, 1052-1058.
Wells, B (2010) Tonal repetition and tonal contrast in English carer-child interaction. In: Barth-
Weingarten,D, Reber, E & Selting, M (eds): Prosody in Interaction. John Benjamins. . 243-262