Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences

Entry requirements

Normally a minimum of an upper second-class Bachelor's degree or a Master's degree in a relevant discipline from a UK university, or an overseas qualification of an equivalent standard.

Months of entry

September

Course content

Speech, Hearing, and Phonetic Sciences (SHaPS) is an international leader in the study of the perception and production of speech. Our graduates work in academia, industry, and the health and public sectors. We enjoy links to researchers around the world, as well as co-operation with major cochlear implant manufacturers and speech technology companies.

The department combines basic research into the mechanisms of speech and hearing with applications to speech technology and hearing impairment, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to this work including Linguistics and Experimental Psychology. Our methodologies include behavioural experimentation; neuroimaging, neurostimulation and neurophysiology; acoustic and articulatory measurement of speech production; and computational modelling and machine learning. We test early development (infants and children) as well as normal adults and aging; normal hearing, hearing impairment, and speech in noise; first and second language learning and bilingualism; comparisons across languages and accents; and evolution of sound systems over time.