Biography
After undergraduate studies in Italian and Spanish and an MPhil in linguistics, Professor Payne specialised in experimental phonetics for her doctoral research, with a thesis on Italian consonant gemination. Following a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (also in Cambridge), she was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Phonetics at UCL.
Prior to coming to Oxford, she also spent a period working in Government (primarily on International Trade Policy), including a secondment to the European Commission, and undertook postgraduate studies in Politics at SOAS.
She tutors and lectures in phonetics and phonology to undergraduates and postgraduates, and supervises doctoral students in topics related to speech prosody, phonetic variation and influences on phonological structure.
Research
Her overarching research interest is speech variation — how it arises, what shapes it and how speakers use it — and its relationship to phonology. Within this frame, She has worked on speech timing and other aspects of prosody, for a range of languages, including how infants acquire these. Her current research investigates prosodic and phonetic variation and convergence arising from societal multilingualism and languages in contact, in particular: in Indian English (as spoken in India and the diaspora); in Cypriot varieties of Greek, Turkish and Arabic; and in Venetan dialect vs the regional Italian of the Veneto.
Current/recent collaborations and fellowships
Affiliate Member of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence for the Dynamics of Language https://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/
Key Research Collaborator, Oxford’s International Multimodal Communication Centre https://imcc.web.ox.ac.uk/home
Leverhulme International Academic Fellow https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/international-academic-fellowships-2020
Member of https://pelagios.org/
Research projects and funding
Current
Mapping Cypriot Prosody: a geo-historical acoustic investigation of the effects of insularity at a linguistic crossroads
The Prosody and Phonetics of Venetan dialect and regional Italian
Contact phonetics and prosody: Indian English in India and the diaspora
World Futures: Multimodal Viewpoint Construction by Russian International Media
Past
The Acquisition of Consonant Timing (ACT)
Acquisition of Prosody in L1 (APriL)
Select Recent Publications
Maxwell, O. and E. Payne (forthcoming 2022) “Investigating (rhythm) variation in Indian English: an integrated approach”, in Fuchs, R. (Ed.) Speech Rhythm in L2 and Learner Varieties of English, Springer
Garmann, Nina, G., P. Hansen, E. Holm, H. G. Simonsen, E. Tengesdal, B. Post, & E. Payne (2021) “Vocalic intrusions in Consonants Clusters in Child-Directed vs. Adult-Directed Speech” Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 2782
Payne, E. (2021) “Comparing and deconstructing speech rhythm across Romance languages” in Gabriel, C., Gess, R. and Meisenburg, T. (eds.) Manual of Romance phonetics and phonology. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter
Garmann, N., H. Simonsen, P. Hansen, B. Post, & E. Payne, (2020) “Cross-linguistic variation in word-initial cluster production in adult and child language: evidence from English and Norwegian”, J. Child Language, 48:1, 1-30
Payne, E. and O. Maxwell (2019) “Tense-Lax Contrasts in Indian English Vowels: transfer effects from L1 Telugu at the Phonetics-Phonology Interface” Proceedings of ICPhS, Melbourne
Sabev, M. and E. Payne (2019) “Transfer of vowel reduction in Turkish-Bulgarian speakers” Proceedings of ICPhS, Melbourne
Post, B. & E. Payne (2018) “Speech rhythm in development: What is the child acquiring” in P. Prieto and N. Esteve-Gibert (eds) Prosodic Development in First Language Acquisition, Benjamins, 125-144
Maxwell, O., E. Payne and R. Billington (2018) “Homogeneity vs heterogeneity in Indian English: Investigating influences of L1 on f0 range”, Proceedings of Interspeech 2018, Hyderabad, India
Payne, E. and O. Maxwell (2018) “Durational variability as a marker of prosodic structure in Indian English(es): temporal parameters”, Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018, Poznań, Poland
Maxwell, O. and E. Payne (2018) “Pitch accent types and peak alignment of rising accents in Indian English(es)”, Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018, Poznań, Poland
Wang, Y and E. Payne (2018) “Investigating prosody in music and speech”, Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018, Poznań, Poland
Payne, E., B. Post, N. Gram Garmann, H. Gram Simonsen (2017) “The acquisition of long consonants in Norwegian” in H. Kubozono (Ed.) Geminate Consonants, OUP, Oxford
Payne, E. (2016) “Prosodic-phonetic biases and the construction of phonological markedness” in M. Lind (Ed) Festschrift for Hanne Gram Simonsen, Novus
Positions
- Fellow in Phonetics and Phonology
- Professor in Phonetics and Phonology, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
Subjects
- Linguistics
