Dr. Ryan Taylor

I am interested in speech and language in use, in context, from speech control up to the physical and cultural context on language use. Most recently, my interests have turned toward the effect of technology on communication breakdown and strategies to overcome this breakdown, the influence of paralinguistic communication signals like prosody and facial expressions on speech production and interpretation, in addition to the development and refinement of research methodology. My past work has looked at the effect of pitch accent on pronoun comprehension using ERP (Brain waves after fancy math) and untangled inconsistent effects of syntactic and referential ambiguity on reading speed.

Before arriving at UBC, I worked in the software industry and developed language teaching materials for the U.S. Department of State in Mexico. I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, a dual M.A. M.Sc in Clinical Linguistics from a consortium of European Universities and a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Alberta.