معرفی
Professor Jennifer Hay is a Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where she has been employed since July 2000. She serves as Director of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour and is actively involved in collaborative interdisciplinary research projects within the institute.
Professor Hay's primary research interests focus on New Zealand English, sociophonetics, laboratory phonology, and morphology. Her work explores how language varies and changes across speakers and contexts, with particular attention to the relationship between speech production and perception. She investigates how social factors influence linguistic patterns and how listeners adapt to different accents and speech styles. Her research combines laboratory methods with corpus-based analysis to address theoretical questions about language structure and use.
Her publication record demonstrates consistent contributions to understanding language variation, especially in New Zealand English. Recent work examines vowel covariation, the influence of music on speech perception, and the implicit knowledge of Māori among non-Māori speakers. She has published over 280 scholarly works, with numerous publications in high-impact journals including Language, Journal of Phonetics, and Laboratory Phonology.
- Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (2010) - $1,000,000 to fund research on Episodic Word Memory (2011-2016)
- Founding Member, Association for Laboratory Phonology (2010)
- Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto
Professor Hay actively supervises numerous graduate students, with recent projects focusing on topics such as language variation in Christchurch schools, audience design in police shows, loanword phonology, and the perception of nonbinary speech. She has secured multiple competitive grants from the Royal Society of New Zealand, including current funding for projects on Māori word categories, implicit grammar learning, and vowel sequences in te reo Māori through 2028.
As Director of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, Professor Hay leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers investigating language processing, acquisition, and variation. Her collaborative approach has fostered partnerships across linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science to advance understanding of how language works in the human mind and society.
