Professor Bill Wells, MA (Oxon), DPhil (York), Dip RSA.
Department of Human Communication Sciences
University of Sheffield
31 Claremont Crescent
Sheffield
S10 2TA
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 2429
Fax: +44 (0) 114 273 0547
email : bill.wells@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
- 1984-1990 Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Phonetics and Linguistics, School of Speech Therapy, Birmingham Polytechnic
- 1990-1992 Lecturer , National Hospital's College of Speech Sciences, London
- 1992-1995: Principal, National Hospital's College of Speech Sciences
- 1995- 2000 Senior Lecturer / Reader / Professor, Department of Human Communication Science, University College London. Head of Department: 1995-1999.
- 2000-present Professor, Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield; Head of Department 2004- 2008.
Research interests
Typical and atypical speech development in children:
- prosodic development
- connected speech features
- regional accents
- cross-linguistic phonological development
- linguistic, psycholinguistic and interactional approaches
Phonetics of talk-in-interaction:
- phonetic aspects of turn organisation across languages
- overlapping talk
Professional activities
- Member for Linguistics (02-6) and Vice chair (04-6), ESRC Research Grants Board
Editorial board member: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Editorial board member: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
- Journal referee: Journal of Child Language, Journal of Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, etc.
- Co-organiser, BAAP 2008 http://baap-08.dept.shef.ac.uk/
Invited presentations:
- The emergence of intonation systems from talk-in-interaction: a case study in child language development. Invited panel presentation, International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Helsinki, May 2006.
- Accessing linguistic systems within talk-in-interaction: A study in child language development.Invited presentation at seminar to launch Centre for Applied Interactional Research, UCL. November 2006.
- Participants’ orientation to prosodic units within talk in interaction. Invited panel presentation: International Pragmatics Association Conference, July 2007.
Current projects
- " Phonetic design of overlapping speech in talk-in-interaction: A cross-linguistic study. Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. £169,654. With Dr Guy Brown, (Department of Computer Science). Research associate: Emina Kurtic. http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~guy/overlappingspeech/index.html
- " Sound to Sense: Marie Curie Research Training Network in Fine Phonetic Detail (Senior Scientist). Research fellow: Jan Gorisch. Lead supervisor: Dr Guy Brown (Department of Computer Science). http://www.sound2sense.eu/ist)
Collaborators
- Dr Guy Brown (Computer Science)
- White Rose Language and Social Interaction group
- Current PhD students: Emina Kurtic, Jan Gorisch, Joy Thompson, Sarah Bryan, Lily Yeh
Key publications
- Kurtic, E, Brown, G & Wells, B. (2009) Fundamental frequency height as a resource for the management of overlap in talk-in-interaction. In Barth-Weingarten, D, Dehé, N & Wichmann, A (eds). Where prosody meets pragmatics Studies in Pragmatics 8. Emerald. 183-204.
- Wells, B & Local, J. (2009) Prosody as an interactional resource: a clinical linguistic perspective. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. 11, 4 321 - 325.
- Howard, S., Wells, B., & Local, J. (2008) Connected speech. In: Ball, M., Perkins, M. Mueller, N., Howard, S. (eds) Handbook of Clinical Linguistics. Blackwell. 583-602.
- Wells, B. & Whiteside, S. (2008) Prosodic impairments. In: Ball, M., Perkins, M. Mueller, N., Howard, S. (eds) Handbook of Clinical Linguistics. Blackwell. 549-567.
- Stackhouse, J., Vance, M., Pascoe, M., Wells, B. (2007). Compendium of Auditory and Speech Tasks: Children's Speech and Literacy Difficulties 4. Chichester: Wiley.