Prof. Wright is director of the Linguistic Phonetics Laboratory and Chair of the Department of Linguistics. His primary research interest is in understanding sources of systematic variation in the production and perception of language, and how it relates to language universals and language structure (i.e., Language), prosody, and discourse. As part of this research he is interested in describing  the phonetics of endangered and under-described languages. His research contains  translational components in  speech technology  and clinical applications related to hearing loss and perception under conditions of distortion.