Dr Kathleen Jepson

Researcher biography
I am a Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. My main research interests are the phonetics and phonology of prosody, primarily in languages of Australia and the Pacific. I am interested in how prosodic structure is realised by and affects speech segments, the use of prosodic cues alongside morphological and syntactic patterns to encode information structure, prosodic variation, and phonetic typology.
I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne associated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Linguistics from the Australian National University. Before I joined UQ in 2024, I held a postdoctoral Humboldt Fellowship, based at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and I was previously a postdoctoral researcher on an ERC Advanced Grant based at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
I enjoy making linguistics accessible and interesting for audiences outside of universities. I am a co-developer of the Linguistics Roadshow - an interactive showcase about the science of language for high school students.