Jonathan Harrington

Biography

Jonathan Harrington completed his undergraduate and post-graduate training at Downing College and the Dept. of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, England from 1977-1986. He was at Edinburgh University, Scotland from 1983-1989, first as a lecturer in experimental phonetics for one year and subsequently as one of the first post-doctoral researchers at the Centre for Speech Technology Research when it was founded in 1984. He joined the Dept. of Linguistics, Macquarie University in October 1989 as a senior lecturer in phonetics and phonology. From 1990, he directed the Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre and from 2000 was co-founder and deputy director of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science directed by Prof. Max Coltheart. He also held short-term appointments in the 1990s as CNRS ‘Directeur de Recherches’ at the Laboratoire de Phonétique, University of Aix-Marseille, France. Since 2002 he has held two appointments in Germany as Chair and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing, first at the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel (2002-2006) and subsequently at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich where he has directed the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing since 2006. In the last 30 years, he has mentored over 20 post-doctoral researchers and 30 doctoral students. He is one of the very few researchers to have held three prestigious advanced European Research Council grants consecutively (2012-2028). He has secure Fellowship nominations from the Humboldt Foundation in the last 15 years for researchers from numerous countries including Albania, Australia, Kenya, the UK, and USA.

Jonathan Harrington’s primary research focus is on understanding how variation in the cognitive processing of speech can sporadically give rise to historical sound change. He brings to bear a wide range of experimental techniques for this purpose, including in recent years real-time magnetic resonance imaging for tracking the movement and coordination of the vocal organs and the development of an agent-based computational model of sound change. Analyses of spoken accent variation have formed a central part of this program: these have been applied to varieties both of English (American, Australian, New Zealand and Standard Southern British) as well as to those of Albanian, Andalusian Spanish, Bavarian German, Italo-Romance, and the Bantu language Meru. He is the author of two books (Harrington, 2010, Wiley-Blackwell; Harrington & Cassidy, 1999: Kluwer) on developing tools for creating, querying, and analysing speech corpora and was one of the founding members in 1990 of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language. A publication in Nature (Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson, 2000) on the changing accent of Queen Elizabeth II remains the study with the largest world-wide press coverage ever in the phonetics and speech sciences. His research on spoken accent and sound change continues to attract media attention: recently, in two articles featured in BBC Future (2022, 2024) and as the author of two pieces in 2022 in The Sunday Times (UK). In 2018, his profile and research were highlighted by the German national radio station ‘Deutschlandfunk’ in their ‘Brain gain’ series.