Hilary Wynne

Hilary Wynne
Senior Research Associate

I am a Senior Research Associate in the Language and Brain Laboratory and a Research Fellow at Kellogg College, working primarily on the EPSRC-funded Pertinacity grant (2022-2027). On this project, I am responsible for the design, execution, and statistical analysis of experiments. I have training in psycholinguistic (reaction time, priming, judgement) and neurolinguistic (EEG and fMRI) methodologies, statistical modelling, fieldwork, and the analysis and visualisation of experimental data.
My current research involves experimentally investigating asymmetries in affixation, the interaction between orthography and phonology, wordhood and non-wordhood, and super-complex morphological constructions. My other research area is language and expertise: specifically, the planning, processing and production of specialised languages by the experts that use them. My current projects, funded by the John Fell Fund, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, are investigating the effects of nonstandard phraseology on the brain in the field of aviation.  
I serve as a tutor for FHS Paper B4: Psycholinguistics and provide supervision for undergraduate and graduate research projects taking place in the Lab. I have previously served as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at St. Hugh's College, tutor for Option B in Graduate Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics, and lecturer for the Oxford Prospects Programme. I have also held positions as a Departmental Lecturer in Psycholinguistics (2020-2021, Oxford), Lecturer in Phonology (2015-2016, Oxford), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester (2016).

Education:

  • DPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford, UK. "The Phonological Encoding of Complex Morphosyntactic Structures in Native and Non-Native English Speakers." Supervisor: Aditi Lahiri.
  • MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford, UK. "The Effects of Cognitive Load on Language Production: A Case Study of Aviation Communication." Supervisor: John Charles Smith.
  • M.A. in Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, CA.
  • M.A. in English and American Studies, University of Manchester, UK.
  • B.A. in English Literature, Wheaton College, Massachusetts.

 

Key Publications:

 

Wynne, H.S.Z. (2025). The psychological reality of ESP processing: Insights from Aviation English. Selected Papers of the 2025 APLX, ETA & TESPA International Conference on English Language Teaching and Learning. English Teachers’ Association- Republic of China.                                                           
Wynne, H.S.Z., Zhou, B., Kotzor, S. & Lahiri, A. (2025). The effect of complex orthography on the visual processing of affixed words. Cognition, 265. 

Wynne, H. S., Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Schuster, S., & Lahiri, A. (2021). Asymmetries in the processing of affixed words in Bengali. Language, 97(3), pp. 599-628. Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/806349

Meng, Y., Kotzor, S., Xu, C., Wynne, H.S.Z., & Lahiri, A. (2021). Asymmetric influence of vocalic context on Mandarin sibilants: Evidence from ERP studies. Frontiers in Neuroscience: Speech and Language. Link: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.617318

Meng, Y., Wynne, H.S.Z., & Lahiri, A. (2021). Representation of “T3 sandhi” in Mandarin: Significance of context. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1893769

Kotzor, S., Schuster, S., Wynne, H.S.Z., & Lahiri, A. (2020). Form or structure? Morphological processing in second-language English speakers: evidence from long-lag lexical decision. In: Sanchez-Stockhammer et al. (eds), Language in Mind and Brain workshop proceedings.

Wynne, H.S.Z., Wheeldon, L., Lahiri A. (2020) Planning complex structures in a second language: Compounds and phrases in non-native speech production, in The Learnability of Complex Constructions: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, ed. Marcel Schlechtweg, Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs (TiLSM) 345, Aug 2020.

Wynne, H.S.Z., Kotzor, S., Zhou, B., Lahiri, A. (2020) The effect of phonological and morphological overlap on the processing of Bengali words, Journal of South Asian Linguistics, 11(2), pp. 25-51. Link: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/jsal/index.php/jsal/article/view/138

Wynne, H.S.Z., Wheeldon, L., Lahiri A. (2018) Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 98, February 2018, pp. 45-58, ISSN 0749-596X. Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2017.08.001 Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X17300591