speaker
Oxford University logo
Phonetics Laboratory
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics

Professor John Coleman

Prof John ColemanProfessor of Phonetics

Address: Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JF, United Kingdom
Email: takes the form firstname.surname@phon.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 270440

Mastodon: @ancientsounds@mastodonapp.uk

"John" is a very common name in the Coleman clann. So if you're looking for my namesake, the psychologist formerly in the Department of Education at Oxford whose primary interest is adolescence, look here. For the American TV weatherman and climate change denier, the English football manager and former player, the Australian rules footballer, or any other John Colemans, you'll need to search elsewhere.

Research 

My main research interests are in phonetics (especially acoustic phonetics), models of sound change, speech technology, laboratory phonology and computational linguistics.

  • Speech synthesis: long ago I worked on formant synthesis in computational phonology (e.g. IPOX)
  • I am currently using speech synthesis to model sound change, and to reconstruct the audio form of spoken words from the past (the Ancient Sounds project)
  • Spoken language corpora, especially the Audio edition of the Spoken BNC, and the IViE corpus
  • I'm particularly interested in statistical approaches to speech and language modelling, especially methods of functional data analysis

Earlier in my career I've worked on:

Publications

Books, peer-reviewed papers and other publications

Teaching and research supervision

From October 2021 I shall be on research leave for three years, so I shall not be teaching (except for a few ongoing doctoral research students), and I'm not taking on new supervisees at this time.

Course materials

Experimental Phonetics TT 2021

Reading lists for tutorials

Undergraduate reading list (introductory)

Advanced undergraduate reading list (e.g. for finals)

Graduate phonology and phonetics tutorial topics and reading list

Practice materials

Phonetics and Phonology paper XII (aural) practice materials