Natalie’s main interests are in the fields of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. These subject areas can be divided into more specific research interests, for example, accents and dialects; language and identity; language and emotion; and aphasia (language impairment after stroke).
Natalie is currently working on several projects relating to these research interests. She is involved with a project examining language variation in the East Midlands, a highly under-researched subject. With the aid of several small grants, Natalie is collecting data from around the East Midlands, examining language variation and studying the perception of variation within the area. Another project involves language and identity in Glasgow and examines the ways people living in Glasgow construct and manage both their local and national identities through linguistic features such as syntactic structures, lexical choices and the use of particular phonological features. A hypothesis to be examined is whether a stronger sense of local identity will correlate with higher usage of local linguistic varieties.
Another research project involves the expression of emotion in language and studies the relationship between them. In previous research Natalie has shown that specific linguistic structures (such as modal particles and tags) can be used in German when talking about highly emotional events. Current research is interested in observing how speakers of English convey emotion and how they talk about highly emotional topics. This research involves observing linguistic features of language (for example intonation, tag questions and disjuncts) as well as non-verbal communication strategies (such as gesture) in both native and non-native speakers of English.
Another topic of research which interests Natalie is the effect of stroke on language. Previous studies she has been involved with have examined the effect of Broca’s aphasia on past tense verb production and what these impairments can tell us about the way language functions in the brain.
