Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Improving the delivery of justice through the analysis of language
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
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- Management team
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- Institute Staff
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Dr Sarah Atkins
Senior Lecturer in English
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Dr Andrea Mojedano Batel
Research Fellow in Forensic Linguistics
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Dr Amy Booth
Researcher in Forensic Linguistics
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Dr Madison Hunter
Associate Deputy Director; Research Associate in Forensic Linguistics
- Honorary and Adjunct Members
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Dr Nabaita Basu
Prof Malcolm Coulthard
Emeritus Professor of Forensic Linguistics
Dr Leigh Harrington
Lecturer in English Language, Linguistics and English Language
University of ManchesterDr Kate Haworth
Interaction in Legal Contexts
EmailDr Annina Heini
EmailProf Deb Leary Prof Yaron Matras
Honorary Professor, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, School of Social Sciences
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Personal website: yaronmatras.orgDr Nadia Makouar
Professor (Associate)
Paul Valéry University, MontpellierDr Helen Newsome-Chandler
Dr Ria Perkins
EmailDr Piotr Pezik
Head, Department of Corpus and Computational Linguistics
University of Lodz
Dr Isabel Picornell
Director, QED Forensic Linguistics Ltd
EmailDr Emma Richardson
Lecturer in Language and Social Interaction
Loughborough UniversityDr Matt TartDr James Tompkinson
Lecturer in Sociolinguistics
York University - PhD Research Students
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Neus Alberich Buera: Discursive constructions of sexual consent in an online community: normalising sexual violence against women (Tahmineh Tayebi, Pam Lowe)
Amy Brown: Examining the prevalence of psychopathic traits and personality disorder indicators in stalker communications (Felicity Deamer) Jessica Burtenshaw: Cross-genre authorship analysis (Tim Grant, Lucia Busso) Jenna Elliott: A corpus assisted critical discourse analysis of mass shooter manifestos (Tahmineh Tayebi) Noorin Iqbal: A linguistic analysis of online religious hate speech against Indian Muslims and Islam (Tahmineh Tayebi)
Lauren Morgan: Using linguistics to enhance investigative interviews with Deaf British Sign Language users (Felicity Deamer) Eden Palmer: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of trans-critical language in an online family support community, 2010-2023 (Nicci MacLeod) Sofia Passetti: Metaphor in psychiatric evidence in murder trials (Felicity Deamer) Karolina Placzynta: Harmful speech in social media comments reacting to news of sexual assault accusations (Nicci MacLeod) 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 (Geoffrey Stewart Morrison) Jordan Robertson: Silence of the suspected: Response latency in police interviews presented to US juries (Sarah Atkins) Lisa Rogers: 'Everything but the signature is me': Idiolect and identity in the personal papers of Alice B. Sheldon (Krzysztof Kredens) 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 Anneke Visser: The application of Authorship Analysis techniques on speech data as a counter to AI-generated voice cloning in speaker comparison (Krzysztof Kredens) Michaela Wolf: The language of the far-right youth (Felicity Deamer) - Former PhD Research Students
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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 (Tim Grant) 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) Julija Danu: Idiolectal distinctiveness and stability across discourse types and links to personality traits (Krzysztof Kredens) Lily Calloway: On developing a framework to analyse evidence of computer-mediated encouraged suicide (Felicity Deamer) Liubov Green: The role and professional identity of the courtroom interpreter in the legal system of england and wales: a social constructionist perspective (Krzysztof Kredens) 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
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Janet Ainsworth
John D. Eshelman Professor of Law Emerita, Seattle University
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Yaron Matras
Honorary Professor, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, School of Social Sciences
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Personal website: yaronmatras.org
Adviser to AIFLMalcolm Coulthard
Professor Emeritus, Birmingham University
Chair of the AIFL Advisory BoardPeter Patrick
Professor Emeritus, Essex University
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Adviser for FTAChris Heffer
Reader, Cardiff University
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Adviser for SILCProfessor Paul Taylor
Chief Scientific Advisor to PolicingDeborah Leary, OBE
CEO and founder of Forensic Pathways
Adviser to AIFL
We are organised into the following research clusters and laboratories
- LiDiLS
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Title: Linguistic Disadvantage in Legal Settings (LiDiLS)
Coordinator: Dr Felicity DeamerThe 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.
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
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Title: Spoken Interaction in Legal Contexts (SILC)
Coordinator: Dr Nicci MacLeodThe 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.
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
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
Discursive Effects of a 'Pioneering Approach' (DEPA): 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.
Talking Rape: Operation Soteria and the Police Interview - Dr Nicci MacLeod (Leverhulme Fellowship 2025-2026)
Following the pilot work undertaken in DEPA, this project digs deeper into the intended and actual effects of Operation Soteria and the National operating model for investigating rape and serious sexual offences in the specific context of ABE interviews with victim/survivors. Drawing on a set of interviews conducted prior to the pilotting of Soteria, and a second set conducted after the national model was rolled out, the project seeks to map the unfolding talk in the interview room onto broader recommnendations for investigative practice.
- HALO
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Title: Harmful and Abusive Language Online (HALO)
Coordinator: Dr Tahmineh TayebiBrings 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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Title: Forensic Text Analysis (FTA)
Coordinator: Dr Krzysztof KredensResearches 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.
Projects
100 Idiolects - Dr Krzysztof Kredens
A resource used to facilitate research on individual variation across discourse types.
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
- FDSL
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Title: Forensic Data Science Laboratory
Director:Professor Geoffrey Stewart Morrison
- FoLD
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Title: Forensic Linguistics Databank
Director: Professor Tim Grant
Click on the links below to find out more about the work of AIFL
- Writing Wrongs Podcast
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Every sentence tells a story, every word leaves a trace.
Listen and subscribe to the true crime podcast with a linguistic twist.
Shortlisted in the True Crime Awards 2026.
Listen to Writing Wrongs from AIFL.
- AIFL Blog
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Welcome to the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics blog
This blog will feature research from the Institute, news about upcoming events and publications, interviews with both staff and students and from people involved in the wider field of forensic (linguistic) research. Feel free to subscribe and check back for updates.
- Events
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We run research seminars every two weeks in term time and half-day symposia every term.
- Publications
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Read about AIFL's recent publications here.
- CPD
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We run Continuing Professional Development courses in Forensic Linguistics and Forensic Data Science.
- MA FL
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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.
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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