The Challenge
At a time of social mobility and technological advancement sociolinguists in the department of English are using their research to contribute to knowledge and understanding of regional speech through the prism of new methodologies and techniques that can be applied in industry and empower speakers whose dialectal background is associated with low prestige.
Research Action
Their collaborative work with local schools and non HEI-partners is enhancing teaching practices, raising awareness of non-standard accents, developing student aspirations and designing a corpus of dialect talk to support automatic speech recognition.
Working in Partnership
External partners include the Hartree Centre, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and secondary schools in the Merseyside area.
Outputs and Outcomes
Outcomes resulting from this research include an online platform for school teachers, workshops for education practitioners and a spoken corpus of Liverpool English which will be used to build a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition system for this regional variation.
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