Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics is the leading hub for forensic linguistics worldwide. Set up as the Centre for Forensic Linguistics in 2008 by Malcolm Coulthard, it was expanded into a research institute with investment from Research England in 2019.

We are a thriving and lively community of over thirty members, from PhD students to professors, and our research is innovative, applied, interdisciplinary and impactful. In addition to conducting cutting-edge research, our members teach on the Aston MA in Forensic Linguistics, a programme that consistently enables graduates to secure careers in policing, intelligence analysis and related fields. We also run CPD courses and provide investigative assistance and expert evidence in criminal and civil cases.

Our diverse efforts are united by a common goal - improving the delivery of justice through the analysis of language.

Our People

Management Team

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​​​​Dr Krzysztof Kredens
Director of Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

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Dr Nicci MacLeod
Deputy Director of Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

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Dr Stefanie Kreibich
Operations Manager for Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

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Emma Wheeley
Research Projects and Strategy Manager

 

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Institute Staff

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Dr Sarah Atkins 
Lecturer in English
Email: s.atkins@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Andrea Mojedano Batel
Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics
Email: a.mojedanobatel@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Amy Booth
Researcher in Forensic Linguistics
Email a.booth@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Lucia Busso 
Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics 
Email: l.busso@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Emily Chiang 
Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics
Email: e.chiang2@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Felicity Deamer
Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics
Email: f.deamer@aston.ac.uk

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Prof Tim Grant
Professor of Forensic Linguistics
Email: t.d.grant@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Kate Haworth
Interaction in Legal Contexts
Email: k.haworth@aston.ac.uk 

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Dr Madison Hunter
Research Associate in Forensic Linguistics
Email: m.hunter5@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Fiona Kelcher
Teaching Fellow 
Email: kelcherf@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Krzysztof Kredens
Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Email: k.j.kredens@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Stefanie Kreibich 
Operations Manager 
Email: s.kreibich@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Nicci MacLeod
Deputy Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Email: n.macleod5@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Geoffrey Stewart Morrison
Director of the Forensic Speech Science Laboratory
Email: g.s.morrison@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Ralph Morton
Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics
Email: r.morton2@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Tahmineh Tayebi
Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics
Email: t.tayebi@aston.ac.uk

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Dr Philip Weber 
Lecturer in Forensic Data Science
Email: p.weber1@aston.ac.uk

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Emma Wheeley
Research Projects and Strategy Manager

 

Honorary and Adjunct Members

Mitchell Abrams Visiting AIFL Researcher Email: 190205803@aston.ac.uk	Dr Isabel Picornell Director, QED Forensic Linguistics Ltd Email: isabel@qedforensics.com
Dr Ria Perkins Email: r.perkins@aston.ac.uk	Dr Emma Richardson Lecturer in Language and Social Interaction Loughborough University
Dr Ewald Enzinger Senior Research Engineer Eduworks Corporation	Dr Claudia Rosas Instituto de Lingüística y Literatura, Universidad Austral de Chile
Dr Leigh Harrington Lecturer in English Language, Linguistics and English Language University of Manchester	Dr James Tompkinson Lecturer in Sociolinguistics York University
Dr Annina Heini Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics University of Melbourne Email: a.heini14@aston.ac.uk	Prof Yaron Matras Honorary Professor, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, School of Social Sciences Email:y.matras@aston.ac.uk Personal website: yaronmatras.org
Dr Nadia Makouar Professor (Associate) Paul Valéry University, Montpellier	Prof Cuiling Zhang School of Criminal Investigation, Southwest University of Political Science and Law
Dr Piotr Pezik Head, Department of Corpus and Computational Linguistics University of Lodz

 

PhD Research Students

Neus Alberich Buera: Discursive constructions of sexual consent in an online community: normalising sexual violence against women	Noorin Iqbal: A linguistic analysis of religious hate speech by Indians against Islam and Muslims of India on Instagram
Amy Brown: The influence of psychopathic traits and personality disorders on stalker communication	Lauren Morgan: Using linguistics to enhance investigative interviews with Deaf British Sign Language users
Lisa Rogers: 'Everything but the signature is me': Idiolect and identity in the personal papers of Alice B. Sheldon	Liubov Green: “the interpreter is a professional, but lower down the pecking order” the role and professional identity of the courtroom interpreter in the legal system of England and Wales: an ethnographic study
Lily Calloway:On developing a framework to analyse evidence of computer-mediated encouraged suicide	Eden Palmer: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of trans-critical language on a parenting forum, 2010-2023
Rafael Oliveira Ribeiro: Development of a system for forensic comparison of casework-relevant face images based on state-of-the-art automatic-face-recognition methods and state-of-the-art forensic-inference methods	Karolina Placzynta: Intersections of hate speech in moderated social media content. A discourse analysis study
Julija Danu: Idiolectal distinctiveness and stability across discourse types and links to personality traits	Jordan Robertson: Silence of the suspected: Response latency in police interviews presented to US juries
Jenna Elliott: A corpus assisted critical discourse analysis of mass shooter manifestos	Anneke Visser: The application of Authorship Analysis techniques on speech data as a counter to AI-generated voice cloning in speaker comparison
Natascha Rohde: “The Incel Rebellion has just begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” - collective identity construction, ideology and the escalation of gender-based violence in computer-mediated discourse

 

Former PhD Research Students

Amy Booth: Collective identity and careers in a white nationalist forum (supervised by Tim Grant, Graeme Hayes and Helen Newsome-Chandler)	Andrea Nini: Authorship profiling in a forensic context (Tim Grant, Jack Grieve)
Annina Heini: Discursive manifestations of the statutory child-adult divide in police interviews with suspects aged 17 and 18. (Kate Haworth, Krzysztof Kredens)	Daniela Schneevogt: Username construction and identity performance in dark web child sexual abuse communications (Tim Grant)
Emily Chiang: Rhetorical moves and identity performance in online child sexual abuse interactions (Tim Grant, Carol Marley)	Eva Nga Shan Ng: The atypical bilingual courtroom: An exploratory study of the interactional dynamics in interpreter-mediated trials in Hong Kong (Malcolm Coulthard, Krzysztof Kredens)
Fiona Kelcher: Anonymity and imitation in linguistic identity disguise (Tim Grant, Abigail Boucher)	Holly Anderson: Deception detection in earnings conference calls: A discourse analytical approach (Krzysztof Kredens, Erika Darics)
Hüliya Kocagül Yüzer: Authorship attribution in Turkish texts (Jack Grieve, David Wright)	Isabel Picornell: Cues to description in a textual narrative context: Lying in written witness statements (Malcolm Coulthard, Tim Grant)
John Blake: Corpus-based study of the rhetorical organization and lexical realization of scientific research abstracts (Krzysztof Kredens)	Juliane Ford: Gender disguise and linguistic identity performance in online writings: Production, perception, and forensic applications (Tim Grant)
Madison Hunter: Violent ideologies: An investigation of the relationship between linguistic evaluative patterns and psychopathology in three types of violent offender (Tim Grant)	Marlon Hurt: Pledging to harm: A linguistic analysis of violent intent in threatening language (Tim Grant, Krzysztof Kredens)
Nicci MacLeod: Police Interviews with women reporting rape: A critical discourse analysis (Carol Marley, Pam Lowe)	Ria Perkins: Linguistic identifiers of L1 Persian speakers writing in English. NLID for authorship analysis (Tim Grant)
Rui Manuel Sousa Silva: Detecting plagiarism in the forensic linguistics turn (Tim Grant)	Samuel Tomblin (now Samuel Larner): “To cut a long story short”: An analysis of formulaic sequences in short written narratives and their potential as markers of authorship (Tim Grant)
Vladislav Mackevic: Native language identification in English texts produced by L1 speakers of Slavic languages (Krzysztof Kredens)	Yvonne Fowler: Non-English-speaking defendants in the magistrates court: a comparative study of face-to-face and prison video link interpreter-mediated hearings in England (Krzysztof Kredens)

 

Members of the AIFL Advisory Board

Janet Ainsworth John D. Eshelman Professor of Law Emerita, Seattle University Email: jan@seattleu.edu Adviser for CLL	Yaron Matras Honorary Professor, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, School of Social Sciences Email: y.matras@aston.ac.uk Personal website: yaronmatras.org Adviser to AIFL
Malcolm Coulthard Professor Emeritus, Birmingham University Chair of the AIFL Advisory Board	Peter Patrick Professor Emeritus, Essex University Email: patrickp@essex.ac.uk Adviser for FTA
Chris Heffer Reader, Cardiff University Email: HefferC2@cardiff.ac.uk Adviser for SILC	Professor Paul Taylor Chief Scientific Advisor to Policing
Deborah Leary, OBE CEO and founder of Forensic Pathways Adviser to AIFL

 

We are organised into the following research clusters

LiDiLS

Title: Linguistic Disadvantage in Legal Settings (LiDiLS)
Coordinator: Dr Felicity Deamer

The central aim is to use linguistic methods to conduct analysis of the language used in a variety of legal settings to explore issues around vulnerability and disadvantage within the legal system. We aim to better understand how vulnerability and disadvantage can be caused, maintained, and shaped by the needs and procedures of the legal system. An enhanced understanding of these issues will facilitate better provision for vulnerable and disadvantaged individuals in myriad legal settings.

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Projects

Ethical uncertainties and inconsistencies in diminished responsibility rulings

Examining ways in which uncertainties in the conceptual underpinnings of diminished responsibility are reflected in ethical uncertainties and inconsistencies in psychiatric evidence. Deamer and Wilkinson. (forthcoming). Ethical uncertainties and inconsistencies in diminished responsibility rulings: a case for psychiatric fictionalism.

SILC

Title: Spoken Interaction in Legal Contexts (SILC)
Coordinator: Dr Nicci MacLeod

The primary research focus is on investigative interviews in policing and other contexts (such as internal or civil investigations), but our remit encompasses other contexts where spoken interaction is central, such as courtroom interaction, emergency calls, and first response encounters. A key tenet of our approach is to work closely with practitioners and external organisations, in order to produce genuinely useful research informed by, and grounded in, professional practice.

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Projects

For the Record - Dr Kate Haworth and Dr Felicity Deamer

A study applying linguistics to improve evidential consistency in police investigative interview records. Haworth et al. (2023). For the Record: applying linguistics to improve evidential consistency in police investigative interview records. Frontiers in Communication, Vol. 8 - 2023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1178516

Tompkinson et al. (2023). Perceptual instability in police interview records: Examining the effect of pauses and modality on people’s perceptions of an interviewee. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 30(1), 22–51. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.24565

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Crimes in Action - Dr Sarah Atkins and Dr Felicity Deamer

A study of police emergency calls in the UK addresses the interactional work conducted when dealing with reports of kidnap. Atkins et al. (2024). Communicating and categorising kidnap incidents in UK police emergency calls. Policing and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2024.2386282

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Discursive Effects of a 'Pioneering Approach': Police interviews with rape victims in the context of Operation Bluestone Soteria - Dr Nicci MacLeod (BA/Leverhulme Small Grant 2023-2024)

This project scrutinised a set of investigative interviews carried out with victims of rape prior to the rolling out of changes enacted by the large-scale research programme Operation Soteria. It has identified a number of key areas of interviewing practice where recommendations from the programme might be put to use. This project served as a pilot for further research for which funding is currently being sought.

HALO

Title: Harmful and Abusive Language Online (HALO)
Coordinator: Dr Tahmineh Tayebi

Brings together work in the institute that focuses on the role of language in the composition and dissemination of hateful and dangerous ideologies in online spaces. From white supremacy to child sexual abuse, from transphobia to the so-called 'manosphere', and from misogyny to pro-suicide fora, discourse is at the heart of a range of dangerous online practices, and our work seeks to unpack these processes to shed light on how we might improve the safety of marginalised and/or vulnerable groups in the online sphere.

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Projects

Online Offensive Language - Dr Tahmineh Tayebi (monograph in press)

In this project, we conduct a multi-layered, corpus-assisted analysis of offensive language across various social media platforms, focusing on the lexical, discursive, and pragmatic features.

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Appraisal for Intelligence Analysis (AIA) - Dr Nicci MacLeod and Dr Madison Hunter (and formerly Professor Tim Grant (Externally Funded)

Testing the utility of Appraisal Theory for investigating and categorising harmful online discourse, with a view to semi-automating the process to assist with intelligence gathering.

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Linguistically Enabled Analytic Dark Search-Engine (LEADS-Engine) - Dr Emily Chiang and Dr Krzystof Kredens (UKRI Innovate UK grant) 

A projects incorporating corpus linguistics tools into a search engine to assist commercial entities (e.g. Banks) in monitoring fraudulent activity on the dark web.

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Hierarchies of Power - Dr Felicity Deamer (and formerly Professor Tim Grant) (Externally funded) 

To provide understanding and tools for the analysis of hierarchies of power across large datasets of anonymous online criminal interactions. Newsome-Chandler, H. & Grant, T. (2023) Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito, Vol. 10 (1)

FTA

Title: Forensic Text Analysis (FTA)
Coordinator: Dr Krzysztof Kredens

Researches individual variation in language use to inform the theory and practice of forensic authorship analysis. We are interested in linguistically-enabled offender identification, the identification of the native dialect or language of non-native speakers of English producing texts in English online, and the correlations between language use and age, and language use and personality.

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Projects

100 Idiolects - Dr Krzysztof Kredens

A resource used to facilitate research on individual variation across discourse types.

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Idiolectal stability in Spanish - Dr Krzysztof Kredens and Dr Andrea Celeste Mojedano Batel

A project investigating patterns of individual linguistic stability across discourse types using Spanish-language data

'Writing Wrongs' podcast

Every sentence tells a story, every word leaves a trace

AIFL blog

Publications

Events

Teaching

Members of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics deliver our world leading MA Forensic Linguistics (with a distance learning option if your preference is to study remotely). Our course is designed to help you explore cutting-edge research and practical applications.

With a £6M UK government grant, we've expanded our capabilities to ensure you receive the very best expertise. Guided by experienced academics, you will delve into numerous topics, from identifying authors to addressing online abuse.

You will engage in real case work, collaborate on research projects and attend seminars to boost your skills. Whether you're looking for a career in policing, intelligence, cybersecurity or academia, our programme equips you with the tools to make a real difference.

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Contact Programme Director, Dr Felicity Deamer for more details.

Forensic Linguistics International Summer School

2025 sees the nineteenth edition, once again held at Aston University.

The city campus is located in the heart of Birmingham, with easy access via rail, road, and air, and has plenty of attractions to discover during the evenings.

The Summer School addresses subjects within the broadly defined discipline of forensic linguistics, including the nature of legal language, forensic authorship analysis, linguistic copyright issues, plagiarism and its detection, and legal translation and interpreting.

We work with authentic language data and use real cases to illustrate theory.

We opt for maximum student involvement, and encourage critical inquiry and debate.

Each year, we invite leading scholars and practitioners in forensic linguistics to be our tutors.

This gives participants the unique opportunity to interact directly with those responsible for recent developments in the field of language and the law and forensic linguistics.

Our tutors have qualifications in linguistics and/or law and some have first-hand experience of providing expert evidence for courts of law.

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See here for more details and to register.

Continuous Professional Development

Laboratory and Data Bank