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Dr Nadine Lavan receives British Psychology Society Award

11 March 2019

Dr Nadine Lavan, of UCL’s Psychology & Languages Sciences, has won the British Psychology Society Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Psychology for her work on how we gain information on people from their voices.

Nadine Lavan

Dr Lavan’s work as a doctoral researcher at the at the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London was judged to have made an outstanding contribution to our understanding in the field.

She was nominated for the award for two papers, the first of which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and investigated the perception of voice identity across different vocalisations.

The second paper, published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, was a call-to-action for researchers in the field to incorporate within-person variability into their work.

Both papers were written in collaboration with Professor Sophie Scott Deputy Director and Head of the Speech Communications Group at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr Lavan said she was delighted to be chosen to win the BPS Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research.

“My research looked at how we perceive identity from voices produced in different situations, environments, and with different intentions,” said Dr Lavan.

“We by now know quite a lot about how listeners understand the linguistic content of speech. Understanding what a person is saying is however only one aspect of human vocal communication.”  

“Voices are part of our everyday lives: voices drive many of our (social) interactions, we are interacting with other humans or via voice-based tech for example, Alexa and Siri. If we want to fully understand how vocal communications works and what effect voices have on us, we need to take not only this linguistic content into account but also need to properly look at all of the paralinguistic features.”

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