Ella Jeffries

Ella is a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Essex where she has worked since September 2017.

Prior to Essex, Ella was a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Worcester (2016-17).

Ella's research interests lie in the field of sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on regional accent variation. She received her PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of York in 2016. Her PhD research looked into children's developing perceptual awareness of phonological regional accent differences. She is currently Principle Investigator on the BA/Leverhulme Small Grant funded project 'Accent the positive' which investigates the development of implicit attitudes towards regional accents among primary school age children. She is also collaborating on a project which investigates language variation in change in Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Her work incorporates approaches from different fields of linguistic research including language variation and change, sociophonetics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics. She is part of a team of researchers working on collaborative projects within the Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan (LaDeLi) at the University Of Essex.