Professor Elinor Payne is a Professor of Phonetics and Phonology at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and a member of the Phonetics Lab. She holds additional roles as a Governing Body Fellow at St Hilda’s College and a Lecturer at Oriel College. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic speech variation, prosody, and the interplay between prosody and gesture in communication. Current projects include studies on Cypriot prosody, Indian English variation, Venetan dialect prosody, and multimodal communication in Russian media. She has been on research leave since 2021 and supervises doctoral students in phonetics, phonology, and contact phonetics. Her research themes encompass speech acquisition, multilingual phonetics, prosody, and sociolinguistic variation. She has led projects funded by institutions like the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC, investigating topics such as speech timing, intonation, and the effects of language contact. Teaching includes phonetics and phonology modules for undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Linguistics, Modern Languages, and Psychology. Professor Payne’s work bridges experimental phonetics, computational methods, and interdisciplinary approaches, with a focus on endangered languages and sociolinguistic dynamics. Her lab, the Phonetics Lab, collaborates on projects like digital mapping of prosodic patterns and multimodal dataset analysis.
