Background

Until September 2024: Joint Degree Programme Director: BSc Speech and Language Therapy; Master of Speech and Language Sciences.

From September 2024: Director of Research, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.

Qualifications

PhD in Linguistics, University of Edinburgh

MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, University of Cambridge

BA in Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Professional membership

Experimental Psychology Society

British Association of Academic Phoneticians

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Research

My research explores speech perception, speech production and their relationship. A focus in my perceptual work has been the mechanisms by which listeners locate the boundaries between spoken words, in typical adult speech processing, infant language development and second language acquisition. In speech production, I am interested in the form and functions of prosody, in particular, speech rhythm and timing.

Some recent work considers prosody in interaction, examining the timing of conversational turns and the impact of conditions such as depression on the dynamics of speech prosody. We are also working on a three-year ESRC-funded project (2024-27), "Predicting the timing of talking: How do speaker and listener factors boost effective conversational timing for communicative goals?", with research associate Robert Lennon and co-investigator Julie Morris.

For a full publication list, including links, please see my personal research website:

https://psychoprosody.com/laurence-white-academic-publications/

PhD students supervised

Current:

• Teresa Garrido-Tamayo (Newcastle, 2019-): Using a story-based dynamic assessment to identify Developmental Language Disorder in children learning English as an additional language.
• Damar Hoogland (Newcastle, 2020-): The dynamics of conversational turn-taking: How does speech timing interact with neural entrainment?
• Yanyu Li (Newcastle, 2021-): Using first language transfer to predict effectiveness of training for second language tone perception.
• Melissa Schorah (Newcastle, 2023-): Individual differences in temporal predictions in speech: word segmentation and conversational turn-taking

Completed:

• Ilaria Torre (Plymouth, 2014-17): The impact of voice on trust attributions.
• Siyu Chen (Greenwich, 2017-21, as external supervisor): A psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical access: the tone-intonation interface and implications for L2 tone acquisition.
• Saleh Ghadanfari (Newcastle, 2018-22): Hierarchical timing in varieties of Kuwaiti Arabic.
• Andreas Krug (Newcastle, 2019-2023): The roles of familiarity, intelligibility and attitude in the processing of native and non-native accents.

PhD studentship applications for January 2025

Applications are encouraged for PhD projects on the broad theme of prosody in speech perception and production, under the supervision of Laurence White and colleagues in Speech and Language Sciences at Newcastle University.

Proposals should be finalised by January 2025: please contact Laurence White as soon as possible to indicate your areas of research interest. Potential themes include, but are not limited to:

• Prosody in interaction, such as the timing of conversational turns across languages.
• The impact of psychiatric conditions such as depression and dementia on the dynamics of speech prosody.
• The roles of regional and second language accent information in speech processing.

Studentships are available via open competition from Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Partnership (NINE DTP: https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/) and Northern Bridge Consortium (http://www.northernbridge.ac.uk/

Overview

Prosody, the melody and timing of speech, tells us about not only the structure and content of spoken interactions, but also the emotional state, attitudes and social origins of conversation partners. We know that our linguistic background can affect our interpretation of prosody, but how far are such perceptual biases determined by experience? Are there prosodic codes that are interpreted consistently by listeners whatever their linguistic background? What could universal cues tell us about the evolutionary origin and historical development of languages? Conversely, how is our use of prosody in speaking and listening affected by individual differences in perception and cognition, including developmental and acquired language disorders? How well do differences along prosodic dimensions predict the ease with which native speakers of one language can learn another?

Research projects addressing these and related themes lend themselves to a range of experimental approaches including: behavioural research, with adults and infants; articulatory analysis; computational modelling and evolutionary simulations; neuroscientific studies using electroencephalography (EEG). Experience in any of these techniques would be useful, as would experience of inferential statistical analysis.

Students with an interest in spoken language and relevant degree qualifications are encouraged to contact Laurence White (laurence.white@newcastle.ac.uk) for further discussion.

Teaching

Degree Programme Director: BSc Speech and Language Therapy; Master of Speech and Language Sciences.

Teaching: Brain and Behaviour II/III (Neurology/Neuropsychology), Research Methods III, Research Methods IV.

Module Leader: SPE3056 Research Methods III and SPE4050 Research Methods IV.

Publications

• Articles

  • Torre I, White L, Goslin J, Knight S. The irrepressible influence of vocal stereotypes on trust. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 2024, 77(10), 1957-1966.
  • Hoogland D, White L, Knight S. Speech rate and turn-transition pause duration in Dutch and English spontaneous question-answer sequences. Languages 2023, 8(2), 115.
  • Torre I, Goslin J, White L. If your device could smile: People trust happy-sounding artificial agents more. Computers in Human Behavior 2020, 105, 106215.
  • White L, Benavides-Varela S, Mády K. Are initial-consonant lengthening and final-vowel lengthening both universal word segmentation cues?. Journal of Phonetics 2020, 81, 100982.
  • Palmer SD, Hutson J, White L, Mattys SL. Lexical knowledge boosts statistically-driven speech segmentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 2019, 45(1), 139-146.
  • Floccia C, Sambrook TD, Luche CD, Kwok R, Goslin J, White L, Cattani A, Sullivan E, Abbott-Smith K, Krott A, Mills D, Rowland C, Gervain J, Plunkett K. Vocabulary of 2‐year‐olds learning English and an additional language: norms and effects of linguistic distance. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 2018, 83(1), 7-29.
  • Floccia C, Keren-Portnoy T, DePaolis R, Duffy H, Delle Luche C, Durrant S, White L, Goslin J, Vihman M. British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli. Cognition 2016, 148, 1-9.
  • White L, Mattys SL, Stefansdottir L, Jones V. Beating the bounds: Localized timing cues to word segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2015, 138(2), 1214-1220.
  • White L, Floccia C, Goslin J, Butler J. Utterance-final lengthening is predictive of infants' discrimination of English accents. Language Learning 2014, 64(s2), 27-44.
  • White L. Communicative function and prosodic form in speech timing. Speech Communication 2014, 63-64, 38-54.
  • Adelman JS, Johnson RL, McCormick SF, McKague M, Kinoshita S, Bowers JS, Perry JR, Lupker SJ, Forster KI, Cortese MJ, Scaltritti M, Aschenbrenner AJ, Coane JH, White L, Yap MJ, Davis C, Kim J, Davis CJ. A behavioral database for masked form priming. Behavior Research Methods 2014, 46(4), 1052-1067.
  • Monaghan P, White L, Merkx MM. Disambiguating durational cues for speech segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2013, 134(1), EL45.
  • White L, Mattys SL, Wiget L. Segmentation cues in conversational speech: Robust semantics and fragile phonotactics. Frontiers in Psychology 2012, 3, 375.
  • White L, Mattys SL, Wiget L. Language categorization by adults is based on sensitivity to durational cues, not rhythm class. Journal of Memory and Language 2012, 66(4), 665-679.
  • White L, Melhorn JF, Mattys SL. Segmentation by lexical subtraction in Hungarian speakers of second-language English. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 2010, 63(3), 544-554.
  • Wiget L, White L, Schuppler B, Grenon I, Rauch O, Mattys SL. How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm?. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2010, 127(3), 1559-1569.
  • White L, Turk AE. English words on the Procrustean bed: Polysyllabic shortening reconsidered. Journal of Phonetics 2010, 38(3), 459-471.
  • Ladd DR, Schepman A, White L, Quarmby LM, Stackhouse R. Structural and dialectal effects on pitch peak alignment in two varieties of British English. Journal of Phonetics 2009, 37(2), 145-161.
  • Liss JM, White L, Mattys SL, Lansford K, Lotto AJ, Spitzer SM, Caviness JN. Quantifying speech rhythm abnormalities in the dysarthrias. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 2009, 52(5), 1334-1352.
  • Mattys SL, Melhorn JF, White L. Effects of Syntactic Expectations on Speech Segmentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 2007, 33(4), 960-977.
  • White L, Mattys SL. Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. Journal of Phonetics 2007, 35(4), 501-522.
  • Mattys SL, White L, Melhorn JF. Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2005, 134(4), 477-500.
  • Turk AE, White L. Structural influences on accentual lengthening in English. Journal of Phonetics 1999, 27(2), 171-206.
  • Foster JC, McInnes FR, Jack MA, Love S, Dutton RT, Nairn IA, White LS. An experimental evaluation of preferences for data entry method in automated telephone services. Behaviour & Information Technology 1998, 17(2), 82-92.

• Book Chapters

  • Ghadanfari S, White L. The role of prosodic durational variation in the temporal coordination of utterances. In: Meyer, L; Strauss, A, ed. Rhythms of Speech and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. In Press.
  • White L. Segmentation of speech. In: Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer and M. Gareth Gaskell, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp.5-30.
  • White L, Liss JM, Dellwo V. Assessment of rhythm. In: Assessment of Motor Speech Disorders. San Diego: Plural, 2011, pp.231-252.
  • White L, Payne E, Mattys SL. Rhythmic and prosodic contrast in Venetan and Sicilian Italian. In: Marina Vigario, Sonia Frota and M. Joao Freitas, ed. Phonetics and Phonology: Interactions and Interrelations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009, pp.137-158.
  • White L, Mattys SL. Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages. In: Pilar Prieto, Joan Mascaró and Maria-Josep Solé, ed. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp.237-257.
  • White L, Turk AE. The domain of the durational effects of accent in Scottish English. In: R. Lawrence, ed. Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics Volume 18, Part 9: Speech and Hearing '96. St. Albans: Institute of Acoustics, 1996, pp.171-178.
  • McInnes FR, White L, Foster JC, Jack MA. An automated style checker for human-computer dialogue engineering. In: Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 1995, pp.149-152.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Torre I, Goslin J, White L, Zanatto D. Trust in artificial voices: A "congruency effect" of first impressions and behavioural experience. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. 2018, Association for Computing Machinery.
  • Torre I, Goslin J, White L, Zanatto D. Trust in artificial voices: a "congruency effect" of first impressions and behavioural experience. In: Proceedings of the Technology, Mind and Society (TechMindSociety '18). 2018, Washington, DC, USA: ACM.
  • Morris-Haynes R, White L, Mattys SL. Listeners’ discrimination of read and spontaneous speech is primed by performance of a prior speech production task. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody. 2016, Boston, USA: International Speech Communications Association.
  • White L, Luche CD, Floccia C. Five-month-old infants’ discrimination of unfamiliar languages does not accord with “rhythm class”. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody. 2016, Boston, USA: International Speech Communications Association.
  • Torre I, White L, Goslin J. Behavioural mediation of prosodic cues to implicit judgements of trustworthiness. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody. 2016, Boston, USA: International Speech Communications Association.
  • Morris Haynes R, White L, Mattys S. What do we expect spontaneous speech to sound like?. In: 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 2015, Glasgow: International Phonetic Association.
  • Torre I, Goslin J, White L. Investing in accents: How does experience mediate trust attributions to different voices?. In: 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 2015, Glasgow: International Phonetic Association.
  • White L, Mattys S, Steffansdottir L, Jones V. Lengthened consonants are interpreted as word-initial. In: Proceedings of the VIIth International Conference on Speech Prosody. 2014, Dublin: International Speech Communications Association.
  • White L, Wiget L, Rauch O, Mattys SL. Segmentation cues in spontaneous and read speech. In: 5th Conference on Speech Prosody. 2010, Chicago, IL, USA: International Speech Communication Association.
  • White L, Mady K. The long and the short and the final: Phonological vowel length and prosodic timing in Hungarian. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody (SP 2008). 2008, Campinas, Brazil: International Speech Communications Association.
  • Grenon I, White L. Acquiring rhythm: A comparison of L1 and L2 speakers of Canadian English and Japanese. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 32). 2008, Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • White L, Mattys SL, Series L, Gage S. Rhythm metrics predict rhythmic discrimination. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI). 2007, Saarbrucken, Germany: Universität des Saarlandes.
  • Turk A, White L. The domain of accentual lengthening in Scottish English. In: 5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (EUROSPEECH '97). 1997, Rhodes, Greece: International Speech Communication Association.