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Nicola Bessell is Lecturer in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at University College Cork, Republic of Ireland, and works on variation in Irish English as well as clinical linguistics.

Nicola started linguistic life with Old and Middle English texts in the BA Hons degree at the University of Oxford, followed by a Master’s degree in Linguistics and Comparative Philology. After working in a bookshop, at Oxford University Press, and then as a research assistant at Oxford University Phonetics Laboratory, she went to Canada to do a PhD. At the University of British Columbia she started fieldwork on First Nations languages. Her PhD research is on the phonetics and phonology of the velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonants of the Interior Salish languages. She held a post-doctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, and a faculty position in the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alice Lee is Lecturer in Speech and Hearing Sciences at University College Cork, Republic of Ireland. Her research focuses on perceptual and instrumental investigations of speech disorders and typical speech production, and listener training for perceptual judgement of speech disorders.