Professor Gerard Docherty

Biography

Gerry Docherty is Professor and Dean (Research) in the Arts, Education and Law Group. After undergraduate studies in Modern Languages at Salford University, he undertook doctoral research in the Department of Linguistics at Edinburgh University where his PhD was conferred in 1989. Before his appointment to Griffith University in 2013, Gerry was Professor of Phonetics and Dean of Research, Innovation and Business Development in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University in the UK.

He has published widely on his research and has received nationally competitive project grants in the UK and Australia. A common strand through all of Gerry’s research work has been a focus on quantitative acoustic analysis of aspects of speech with a view to enhancing understanding of the nature of phonetic variability and its implications for phonetic theory. He is particularly interested in understanding the properties of social-indexical phonetic variability and how this patterns both within–and across–speakers.

While much of his work has been focused on typical adult speakers, he has also investigated the acquisition of speech sound patterning in children and the nature of speech in populations of speakers with atypical speech production. He was recently Chief Investigator (with Paul Foulkes from University of York in the UK) on an ARC-funded Discovery Project on "The social dynamics of language: a study of phonological variation and change in West Australian English". Gerry has supervised doctoral projects in sociophonetics, descriptive and theoretical phonetics and clinical phonetics.