I wrote a chapter on phonetics for this A-Level/first year undergraduate textbook at the beginning of my interest in children’s phonology.  Since then I have become fascinated by children’s pronunciation, how it develops, and how it relates to the voices children hear around them.  This interest has developed into my doctoral research on children’s accent acquisition.  This closely aligns with my teaching in phonetics and phonology, and particularly in relation to our year three module, Child Language Acquisition.  As part of my research I have been investigating how I can use acoustic phonetics to learn about children’s pronunciations, and how the sociolinguistics of children’s speech relates to adult sociolinguistic patterns, both somewhat under-researched areas.  I bring this research into the classroom wherever possible, so that students are able to work at the boundaries of our knowledge of phonetics and phonology in children.

Nikki Swift

You can find my official university webpage here.