Rory Turnbull

I am a Senior Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology in the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University, and I am interested in how people use and mentally represent the sounds of language.

Prior to Newcastle, I worked as assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris. I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the Ohio State University, and an MA (Hons) in Linguistics and English Language from the University of Edinburgh.

Click to download my CV (pdf).

Research

I am interested in the phonological processes and representations of the mental lexicon and as such my research sits at the intersection between phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. In my PhD dissertation, I investigated the cognitive source of frequency and predictability effects in spoken language. More generally, I am interested in the ways that frequency, predictability, and other usage-based factors influence linguistic sound structures. My current research examines how factors of lexical organization, such as phonological neighborhood density, influence speech production and perception. Additionally, I maintain an active research agenda in intonation and prosody, investigating the relationships between predictability, context, and the phonetics of prosodic contrasts.

I use a wide variety of research paradigms, drawing from experimental phonetics, cognitive psychology, and theoretical phonology. There is no “one size fits all” solution to research in the language sciences. This methodological pluralism entails a cross-linguistic approach, which is vital for the advancement of the field, particularly when a key finding is based on data from a small number of languages. Several of my projects involve cross-linguistic studies and diverse methodological approaches.

Publications

Journal articles

  1. Stefano Coretta, Joseph V Casillas, Simon Roessig, Michael Franke, … Rory Turnbull … & Timo Roettger. (2023). Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 6(3): 1–29. Paper (pdf).
  2. Cynthia G Clopper, Rachel Steindel Burdin, & Rory Turnbull. (2023). Second dialect acquisition and phonetic vowel reduction in the American Midwest. Journal of Phonetics, 99: 101243. Paper (pdf).
  3. Gerda Ana Melnik-Leroy, Rory Turnbull, & Sharon Peperkamp. (2021). On the relationship between perception and production of L2 sounds: Evidence from Anglophones’ processing of the French /u/–/y/ contrast. Second Language Research, 38(3): 581-605. Paper (pdf).
  4. Cynthia G Clopper, Rachel Steindel Burdin, & Rory Turnbull. (2019). Variation in /u/ fronting in the American Midwest. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(1): 233-244. Paper (pdf).
  5. Rory Turnbull. (2019). Listener-oriented phonetic reduction and theory of mind. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 34(6): 747-768. Paper (pdf).
  6. Rory Turnbull. (2018). Effects of lexical predictability on patterns of phoneme deletion/reduction in conversational speech in English and Japanese. Linguistics Vanguard, 4(S2): 20170033. Paper (pdf).
  7. Cynthia G Clopper, Rory Turnbull, & Rachel Steindel Burdin. (2018). Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech. Linguistics Vanguard, 4(S2): 2017044. Paper (pdf).
  8. Rory Turnbull, Scott Seyfarth, Elizabeth Hume, & T Florian Jaeger. (2018). Nasal place assimilation trades off inferrability of both target and trigger words. Laboratory Phonology, 9(1), 15. Paper (open access).
  9. Rory Turnbull & Sharon Peperkamp. (2017). The asymmetric contribution of consonants and vowels to phonological similarity: Evidence from lexical priming. The Mental Lexicon, 12(3): 404–430. Paper (pdf).
  10. Rory Turnbull. (2017). The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 47(3): 251–282. Paper (pdf).
  11. Jeffrey J Holliday, Rory Turnbull, & Julien Eychenne. (2017). K-SPAN: A lexical database of Korean surface phonetic forms and phonological neighborhood density statistics. Behavior Research Methods, 49(5): 1939–1950. Paper (pdf).
  12. Rory Turnbull, Adam J Royer, Kiwako Ito, & Shari R Speer. (2017). Prominence perception is dependent on phonology, semantics, and awareness of discourse. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(8): 1017–1033. Paper (pdf).
  13. Kiwako Ito, Rory Turnbull, & Shari R Speer. (2017). Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors. Laboratory Phonology, 8(1): 6, 1–29. Paper (open access).
  14. Rory Turnbull. (2017). The role of predictability in intonational variability. Language and Speech, 60 (1): 123–153. Paper (pdf).
  15. Seth J Wiener & Rory Turnbull. (2016). Constraints of tones, vowels and consonants on lexical selection in Mandarin Chinese. Language and Speech, 59(1): 59–82. Paper (pdf).
  16. Rory Turnbull, Rachel Steindel Burdin, Cynthia G Clopper, & Judith Tonhauser. (2015). Contextual predictability and the prosodic realisation of focus: A cross-linguistic comparison. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(9): 1061–1076. Paper (pdf).
  17. Rachel Steindel Burdin, Sara Phillips-Bourass, Rory Turnbull, Murat Yasavul, Cynthia G Clopper, & Judith Tonhauser. (2015). Variation in the prosody of focus in head- and head/edge-prominence languages. Lingua, 165(B): 254–276. Paper (pdf).
  18. D Robert Ladd, Rory Turnbull, Charlotte Browne, Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Lesya Ganushchak, Kate Swoboda, Verity Woodfield, & Dan Dediu. (2013). Patterns of individual differences in the perception of missing-fundamental tones. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 39 (5): 1386–1397. Paper (pdf).

Proceedings, book chapters, and book reviews

  1. Rory Turnbull. (2023). Phonological network properties of nonwords influence their learnability. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp4056–4060. Paper (open access).
  2. Rory Turnbull. (2023). The effect of usage predictability on phonetic and phonological variation. In Díaz-Campos, M. & Balasch, S. (eds.) The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics, pp145–160. Paper.
  3. Sharon Peperkamp, Victor Antoine, & Rory Turnbull (2022). Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Quantifying French liaison-induced homophony. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp2409–2415. Paper (open access).
  4. Rory Turnbull. (2022). Managing phonological data in a perception experiment. In Berez-Kroeker, A. L., McDonnell, M., Koller, E., Collister, L. B. (eds.), The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, pp557–564. Paper (open access).
  5. Rory Turnbull. (2021). Graph-theoretic properties of the class of phonological neighbourhood networks. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pp233–240. Paper (open access).
  6. Rory Turnbull & Sharon Peperkamp. (2019). Across-language priming in bilinguals: does English bet prime French bête? Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp1367–1371. Paper (pdf).
  7. Rory Turnbull. (2018). Review of Kennedy (2017), “Phonology: a coursebook” in Phonology, 35(3): 530–536. Review (pdf).
  8. Cynthia G Clopper & Rory Turnbull. (2018). Exploring variation in phonetic reduction: Linguistic, social, and cognitive factors. In Cangemi, F., Clayards, M., Niebuhr, O., Schuppler, B., & Zellers, M. (eds.), Rethinking Reduction: Interdisciplinary perspectives on conditions, mechanisms, and domains for phonetic variation, pp25–72. Paper (pdf).
  9. Bradley McDonnell & Rory Turnbull. (2018). Neural network modeling of prosodic prominence in Besemah (Malayic, Indonesia). Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Paper (open access).
  10. Thomas Schatz, Rory Turnbull, Francis Bach, & Emmanuel Dupoux. (2017). A quantitative measure of the impact of coarticulation on phone discriminability. Proceedings of Interspeech 2017, pp3033–3037. Paper (open access).
  11. Rory Turnbull & Sharon Peperkamp. (2017). What governs a language’s lexicon? Determining the organizing principles of phonological neighbourhood networks. In Cherifi, H., Gaito, G., Quattrociocchi, W., & Sala, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications, pp83–94. Paper (pdf).
  12. Magnus Pharao Hansen, Néstor Hernández-Green, Rory Turnbull, & Ditte Boeg Thomsen. (2016). Life histories, language attitutdes and linguistic variation: Navigating the micro-politics of language revitalization in an Otomí community in Mexico. In Pérez-Báez, G., Rogers, C., & Rosés Labrada, J. E. (eds.), Language Documentation and Revitalization: Latin American Contexts, pp215–246. Paper (pdf).
  13. Rachel Steindel Burdin, Rory Turnbull, & Cynthia G Clopper. (2015). Interactions among lexical and discourse characteristics in vowel production. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA), 22, 060005. Paper (pdf).
  14. Rory Turnbull. (2015). Patterns of individual differences in reduction: Implications for listener-oriented theories. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Paper (pdf).
  15. Jeffrey J Holliday & Rory Turnbull. (2015). Effects of phonological neighborhood density on word production in Korean. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Paper (pdf).
  16. Rory Turnbull, Adam J Royer, Kiwako Ito, & Shari R Speer. (2014). Prominence perception in and out of context. Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Speech Prosody, p1164–1168. Paper (pdf).
  17. Rory Turnbull & Cynthia G Clopper. (2013). Effects of semantic predictability and dialect variation on vowel production in clear and plain lab speech. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA), 19: 060116. Paper (pdf).
  18. Richard Littauer, Rory Turnbull & Alexis Palmer. (2012). Visualising Typological Relationships: Plotting WALS with Heat Maps. Proceedings of the European Association of Computational Linguistics 2012 Workshop on the Visualization of Linguistic Patterns, p30–34. Paper (pdf).

Contact

You can email me at rory.turnbull@newcastle.ac.uk.