• PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
• MA in General Linguistics, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

I began working at the University of Birmingham in 2016. I received an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. I also worked as a doctoral fellow and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

I teach a range of BA and MA modules, including Language and the Mind, Psycholinguistics, Language and the Senses, Lexical Semantics and Applied Statistics for Linguists.

I am interested in supervising MA and PhD research in the areas of:

• Quantitative linguistics and statistical approaches to corpus linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics, metaphor and gesture
• Language evolution and computational modeling
• Evolutionary phonology, exemplar models of speech

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Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research focuses on the intersection of language and perception. In my PhD work, I utilize corpus methods to study the distributional characteristics of English sensory words such as “fragrant” and “cloying”. I have also worked extensively on such topics as metaphor, language evolution, gesture, sound symbolism and politeness. The different strands of my research are unified by a strong commitment to rigorous statistical methods and reproducible research practices.

• Winter, B., & Wedel, A. (2016). The co-evolution of speech and the lexicon: The interaction of functional pressures, redundancy and category variation. Topics in Cognitive Science.
• Winter, B., & Wieling, M. (2016). How to analyze linguistic change using mixed models, Growth Curve Analysis and Generalized Additive Modeling. Journal of Language Evolution, 7-18.
• Winter, B., & Wedel, A. (2016). Commentary: Desiccation and tone within linguistic theory and language contact research. Journal of Language Evolution, 1, 80-82.
• Matlock, T., & Winter, B. (2015).  Experimental semantics. In B. Heine and H. Narrog (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (pp. 771-790). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Winter, B., & Matlock, T., Shaki, S., & Fischer, M. (2015). Mental number space in three dimensions. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 57, 209-219.
• Mason, P., Dominguez, D., J.F., Winter, B., & Grignolio, A. (2015). Hidden in plain view: Degeneracy in complex systems. BioSystems, 128, 1-8.
• Winter, B., & Marghetis, T., & Matlock, T. (2015). Of magnitudes and metaphors: Explaining cognitive interactions between space, time and number. Cortex, 64, 209-224.
• Winter, B. (2014). Spoken language achieves robustness and evolvability by exploiting degeneracy and neutrality. BioEssays, 36, 960-967.
• Winter, B. (2014). Horror movies and the cognitive ecology of primary metaphors. Metaphor & Symbol, 29, 151-170.
• Brown, L., Winter, B., Idemaru, K., & Grawunder, S. (2014). Phonetics and politeness: Perceiving Korean Honorific and non-honorific speech through phonetic cues. Journal of Pragmatics, 66, 45-60.
• Huette, S., Winter, B., Matlock, T., Ardell, D. H., & Spivey, M. H. (2014). Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 410.
• Röttger, T., Winter, B., Grawunder, S., Kirby, J., & Grice, M. (2014). Assessing the incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German. Journal of Phonetics, 43, 11-25.
• Winter, B., Perlman, M., & Matlock, T. (2014). Using space to talk and gesture about numbers: Evidence from the TV News Archive. Gesture, 13, 377-408.
• Bentz, C., & Winter, B. (2013). Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case. Language Dynamics & Change, 3:1, 1-27.
• Lancia, L., & Winter, B. (2013). The interaction between competition, learning and habituation dynamics in speech perception. Laboratory Phonology, 4:1, 221-257.
• Winter, B., & Matlock, T. (2013). Making judgments based on similarity and proximity. Metaphor & Symbol, 28:4, 219-232.
• Winter, B. (2013). Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications. arXiv:1308.5499.
• Huette, S., Winter, B., Matlock, T., & Spivey, M. J. (2012). Processing motion implied in language: eye-movement differences during aspect comprehension. Cognitive Processing, 13:1, 193-197.
• Winter, B., & Bergen, B. (2012). Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily: evidence for the immersed experiencer view. Language and Cognition, 4:1, 1-16.
• Winter, B., & Grawunder, S. (2012). The phonetic profile of Korean formality. Journal of Phonetics, 40, 808-815.
• Winter, B. (2010). A note on the higher phylogeny of Austronesian. Oceanic Linguistics, 49:1, 282-287.