Dr Hilary Wynne wins John Fell Fund award

Dr Hilary Wynne, Research Fellow at Kellogg, has won a grant from the John Fell Fund to support her research on language and the brain. The John Fell Fund is an internal research scheme financed by Oxford University Press that aims to foster creativity and a proactive approach to research opportunities in all subject areas, particularly interdisciplinary fields.

Hilary won the award to develop her research on a project entitled ‘Eliciting language-specific signatures for expertise in the human brain’. Hilary is a Senior Research Associate at the Language and Brain Laboratory, part of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics. She is currently working on a project funded by an EPSRC grant (2022-2027). Her research focuses on experimentally exploring how underlying patterns influence the processing of sounds in related languages using psycholinguistic behavioural methods and neurolinguistic techniques.

The project uses electrophysiological measurements of brainwave activity (EEG) to examine how experts (pilots) employ contextual cues in sentences to process language in the field of aviation. Using a specialised language (which can often feature small vocabularies and restricted syntax) is often an integral part of being an expert in a field (e.g. medicine, aviation). While nonstandard language use in aviation has long been identified as a serious problem, the industry lacks effective data on how language in the field is processed.

Working together with an external partner, Mr Henry Emery of Latitude Aviation English Services, the aim is to establish precisely how violations in specialised language affect the expert brain and demonstrate why maintaining language standardisation in aviation is so important.

“I am very thankful for the opportunity to lay the groundwork for future collaborations between the aviation training sector and academia.”