Faith Chiu

Faith is a lecturer in phonology and phonetics at the University of Essex where she has worked since January 2020. Prior to Essex, Faith was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of York (2018-2019) where she studied how people hear speech when distracted.

In her interdisciplinary research, Faith uses experimental techniques from psychoacoustics and cognitive neuroscience and to study how people hear and make speech sounds (phonetics, phonology, speech perception, psycholinguistics). She received her PhD in Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences from University College London in 2018. Her PhD research looked into brain connectivity when listening to changes in speech and non-linguistic sounds. Faith’s doctoral research also tracked adaptation strategies in speaking and listening in a geographically mobile population; she studied how Northern British English speakers cope with listening to English in different accent after moving to London.

Faith is currently Principle Investigator on a British Academy funded project 'Communicating through COVID-19 and beyond: a multi-language study of speech perception in adverse listening conditions’. She is studying how people adapt to (or struggle with) listening to speech produced through a face-covering across multiple languages. She is also involved in a couple other projects investigating topics such as language choice and identity (the sociolinguistics of UK migrant populations), and regionally-driven preservation of Chinese sound patterns.