Phonetics and Phonology Research Group

History

Our laboratory- and applications-based approach to linguistic questions has a long history. Edinburgh was the second university in the UK (after Unversity College London) to establish a phonetics department. From 1948 to 1967 the department existed as a separate entity under the leadership of David Abercrombie. It was the first European department to acquire a sound spectrograph, and it carried out pioneering research on speech technology before the term "speech technology" even existed (Walter Lawrence's "Parametric Artificial Talker", or PAT, was developed here). It also made important contributions in speech pathology and dialectology. One of our first graduates was Peter Ladefoged.

In 1967 the Phonetics Department merged with the Department of General Linguistics (headed at that time by John Lyons), and in 1969 the Department of Applied Linguistics (headed by Pit Corder) joined the other two to form a single department. This merged department played a central role in the establishment of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research (1984) and Human Communication Research Centre (1989), in collaboration with various departments in what is now the School of Informatics. Links between LEL and Queen Margaret University (QMU) also have a long history. There are current staff members at QMU who studied at LEL and vice-versa, and there have been collaborative research projects, particularly on developmental topics and on speech production, since the 1980s.