Dr Sam Kirkham

Senior Lecturer

Research Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, where I co-direct the Phonetics Laboratory and lead the Speech Physics Group. I am also affiliated with the Data Science and AI Institute. I currently serve as associate editor at Journal of Phonetics and area chair for Interspeech 2026. I was awarded my PhD in 2014 from the University of Sheffield.

My research aims to discover the physical and cognitive principles that govern spoken language. I pursue this in two strands: (1) understanding how the vocal tract produces speech and why this varies between different speakers, dialects and languages; (2) developing computational models of speech planning, production and perception. I study this using a combination of vocal tract imaging (MRI, ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography) and computational modelling. My research is funded by UKRI (2019-25) and The Royal Society (2025-27) and currently focuses on the following areas:

Discovering the dynamical laws of speech communication. My primary research goal is to uncover the dynamical principles that structure speech communication. My previous work discovered dynamical laws that govern speech movements (see here, here and here). My current research is developing new approaches to inferring time-varying control structures from higher-dimensional speech data (with Aneta Stefanovska).
Interpretable acoustic-articulatory inversion. We are developing physics-informed machine learning for building interpretable models that link speech acoustics to vocal tract movements and the underlying control dynamics of speech (with Anton Ragni).
Articulatory dynamics across speakers and languages. I use vocal tract imaging to study how speakers coordinate articulatory movements during speech, and to test predictions from dynamical models. A central question is whether speakers and languages differ in their dynamical organization, and whether this results in different articulatory strategies (with Patrycja Strycharczuk).