You will work together with Prof. James McQueen and a PhD candidate on an NWO-funded project (’Plugging talkers in: A new solution to the variability problem in human speech recognition’). The project seeks to understand how listeners cope with the fact that spoken words are acoustically hugely variable. Words vary across talkers (e.g. the same word is pronounced in a physically dramatically different manner by a two-year-old girl versus an 80-year-old man) and words vary not only segmentally but also prosodically. The project explores the hypothesis that listeners store knowledge about how individual talkers speak and ’plug in’ that knowledge as they recognise those individuals’ words. The project has two aims: (1) to use computational modelling to build a new Bayesian model with ’plug-ins’, and (2) to run word-learning experiments to test the model. You will be responsible for the computational modelling and also co-supervise the PhD candidate who will be running the experiments.