Toby Hudson
My doctoral research concerns word stress in Indo-European from an acoustic-phonetic perspective. I am exploring how acoustic gradience, as perceived by listeners, may lead to categorical judgments, and so underlie historic accent shift — such as the trajectory from dynamic/lexically specified accent to weight-sensitive stress in Latin — and changes in the nature of the accent. I am interested in the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accent and I aim to apply computational techniques and laboratory phonology to the question of what this accent might have sounded like.
I am a member of Wolfson College. I have given tutorials to undergraduate students in Wadham, St Peter’s, St Catherine’s and St Hilda’s colleges, and assisted with the graduate experimental phonetics course. Previously I gave FHS lectures for paper B1 (Phonetics and Phonology).
Before coming to Oxford I taught linguistics at University College London and I was a senior research engineer in speech at Samsung Research UK. A lot of my research (with the Phonetics Laboratory, University of Cambridge) has been concerned with forensic phonetics, and I have undertaken criminal casework in the UK. I helped to make some familiar synthetic voices.
Selected publications
2022, T. Hudson, J. Setter and P. Mok, ‘English intonation in storytelling: a comparison of the recognition and production of nuclear tones by British and Hong Kong English speakers’. English World-Wide 43.3: 357-381.
2021, T. Hudson, K. McDougall and V. Hughes, ‘Forensic Phonetics.’ In: R.-A. Knight and J. Setter (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2015, K. McDougall, F. Nolan and T. Hudson, ‘Telephone transmission and earwitnesses: performance on voice parades controlled for voice similarity.’ Phonetica 72.4: 257-272.
2013, F. Nolan, K. McDougall and T. Hudson, ‘Effects of the telephone on perceived voice similarity: implications for voice line-ups.’ International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 20.2: 229-246.
2009, B. Post, F. Nolan, E. Stamatakis and T. Hudson. ‘Categories and gradience in intonation: Evidence from linguistics and neurobiology.’ Interspeech 2009. Brighton.
