Research
I'm currently working on the following research projects...
- Language Analysis in the Swiss Asylum System (LAITSAS)
As part of my Habilitation project, I am an academic consultant to LINGUA, the division at the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration that undertakes Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO) casework.
- Language Variation and Change in the Falkland Islands
Prof. Dave Britain, Dr Andrea Sudbury and I are tracking language change on the south Atlantic islands of the Falklands, by comparing a speech corpus collected there by Andrea in 1997 with another I collected on the islands in 2020.
I'm also involved in studies relating to...
- Forensic Phonetics and Swiss German
e.g., Hedegard, H., A. Fröhlich, F. Tomaschek, C. Steiner, A. Leemann (2023). Filling the population statistics gap: Swiss German reference data on F0 and speech tempo for forensic contexts. Proceedings of Interspeech 2023.
Leemann, A., P. Jeszenszky, S. Steiner, H. Hedegard, D. Britain (in review). Identifying social and soft biometric information from speech. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law.
- World Englishes, with a special focus on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands
e.g., Hedegard, H. (2021) Somewhere between Australia and Malaysia and ‘I’ and ‘we’: Verbalising Culture on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, in Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes in the Twenty-first Century, Peters, P. and Burridge, K. (eds), Edinburgh University Press
- Linguistics in the High School
Through collaboration between the English, German and Italian institutes at the University of Bern ( the latter two represented by Prof. Adrian Leemann and Prof. Silvia Natale respectively) and Gymnasiums in the local area, this preliminary project aims to introduce language and linguistic science into the "Matura" studies of Bernese high schoolers.
- Paralanguage and Closed Captions
Together with Prof. Crispin Thurlow, I'm looking at transmodalisation processes and effects involved in the closed captioning of highly variable paralinguistic features such as vocal bursts/response cries.
e.g., Thurlow, T. & Hedegard, H. (in review) More than regimentation? Paralinguistic transmodalization, semiotic ideologies, and the language work of closed captioning. Journal of Sociolinguistics.