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Felicity Deamer

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Research Fellow, Aston University

As a Research Fellow in the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) I will be exploring the linguistic and communicative dynamics of police interviews. I am particularly interested in how the state of mind (and associated deficits) of an interviewee with serious mental illness can affect an investigative interview. Of particular interest are (a) how the SMI might affect the evidential value of the interview, (b) how an interviewer’s knowledge of an SMI diagnosis might affect an investigative interview, and (c) whether detailed recommendations and/or training can be provided for interviewers to take into account the effects of the SMI and thereby optimise the evidential value of the interview.

More broadly, I will be working with other members of AIFL to examine how transcriptions of police interview recordings are made and subsequently used in court as evidence, and how this process might be improved to increase the evidential value of those police interviews.

Prior to my post at Aston, I've held research fellowships on interdisciplinary mental health research projects. I have used a variety of methods, from conversation analysis to eye-tracking, to investigate a variety of phenomena, including patient/therapist interactions and metaphor comprehension in psychosis.

Qualifications
2013 - University College London - PhD in Linguistics

2009 - University College London - MRes Speech, Language and Cognition

2007 - University College London - BA Linguistics (1st class with honours)

Employment
November 2019 - Present, Aston University

Research Fellow, Institute for Forensic Linguistics

October 2016 – October 2019, Durham University

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, “Hearing the Voice”

March 2014 - October 2016, Durham University

Postdoctoral Research Associate, “Language and Mental Health”

Experience

  • 2019–2022
    Research fellow, Aston University
  • 2014–2019
    Research fellow, Durham University

Education

  • 2013 
    University College London, PhD
  • 2009 
    University College London, MRes Speech, Language, and Cognition
  • 2007 
    University College London, BA Linguistics

Publications

  • 2020
    Why do we talk to ourselves?, Review of Philosophy and Psychology
  • 2019
    Factive and counterfactive interpretation of embedded clauses in aphasia and its relationship with lexical, syntactic and general cognitive capacities, Journal of Neurolinguistics
  • 2019
    Language in Schizophrenia and Aphasia: The Relationship with Non-verbal Cognition and Thought Disorder, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
  • 2019
    Non-literal understanding and psychosis: Metaphor comprehension in individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Research: Cognition
  • 2019
    The Ice in Voices: Understanding negative content in auditory-verbal hallucinations, Clinical Psychology Review
  • 2018
    Relating Therapy for distressing voices: Who, or what, is changing?, Psychosis
  • 2018
    Relating to the Speaker behind the Voice: What is changing?, Frontiers in Pyschology
  • 2018
    The language profile of formal thought disorder, npj Schizophrenia
  • 2015
    The Speaker Behind the Voice: Therapeutic lessons from pragmatic theory, Frontiers in Pyschology