Reenu Punnoose
A native of Kerala in South-West India, I was born and brought up in the Middle East (Kuwait) till I was 12 and the rest in India. I majored in English literature for my Bachelors Degree and got rather fascinated by the one and only module on Linguistics that the degree luckily offered, and I knew I had found what i wanted to do and who i wanted to be- a Linguist, more specifically, a phonetician!!
My family has had a history of studying in England for their PG beginning with my father who did a higher degree in Phonetics at the University of Essex in the late 70’s and has been one of my main sources of inspiration to venture into the same area of research. My brother followed my father in choosing England as the place for higher education and it only seemed natural for me to do the same.
I think apart from the weather, I’ve pretty much taken very well to most things British!
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
- PhD Speech Sciences/Phonetics, University of Newcastle (Nov 06-): see Current Research.
- M.A Applied Linguistics (distinction), University of York (Oct 05-Sept 06): my dissertation looked at the evidence of interference in the production patterns of Malayali-English bilingual children in Liverpool.
- B.A English literature and language (high 1st class) University of Madras, Stella Maris College, India, (2002-2005).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My academic interests range from anything related to experimental phonetics, (especially those focussing on Dravidian languages) acoustic and articulatory work, sociophonetics- accent and dialect work, and bilingualism, phonetic and phonological acquisition etc.
CURRENT RESEARCH
I am currently working on the rhotics in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in South-West India under the supervision of Dr. Ghada Khattab. I am interested in the phonetics and phonology of the contrastive rhotics in the language and also a certain fifth liquid in its consonant inventory the phonetic and phonological nature of which are uncertain in the limited literature on Malayalam.
Progress so far: The main data is being labelled using PRAAT (i.e segmentation using text grids) to then eventually run automated scripts to enable quicker measurements but nevertheless the measurements will be double checked manually.
If I manage funding on time, I am hoping to be able to also carry out some articulatory work to obtain a better picture of the production patterns of taps/trills/ 5th liquid by Malayali speakers.
CONFERENCES & PUBLICATIONS
Punnoose, R. (2007). Rhotics in Malayalam. BAAP COLLOQUIUM, poster presentation, Sheffield.
TEACHING
I have been a teaching assistant on the introductory phonetics modules for the 1st & 2nd year BSc and MSc Speech Therapy students in the department of Speech Sciences here at Newcastle since Sept, 07.
CONTACT
Email: reenu.punnoose@ncl.ac.uk
Address:
Department of Speech sciences (ECLS)Room 2.14
King George Building
University of Newcastle
Newcastle-upon-tyne
NE1 7RU.