About me
Hello!! My name is Xinyu /ɕɪn.ɥy/ (like “Shin-yu” in English) Listen to my name in Mandarin Chinese
I’m a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. I’m a phonetician/laboratory phonologist and computational psycholinguist by training. The central focus of my research is the adaptability and cognitive encoding involved in speech perception and production. I enjoy combining theories/methods from different subfields, including psycholinguistic experiments, computational language models, large-scale corpus analysis, cross-linguistic phonetic universals, and theories of linguistic change.
my CV is here: last updated in Oct 2025
Research
Surprisal effects in the information packaging of speech variation
Supervisors: Dr. Barend Beekhuizen (primary advisor) and Dr. Jessamyn Schertz
This is my ongoing project for the second Generals Paper at U of T. We are investigating how surprisal derived from language models predicts variation in speech signals in large-scale corpora.
Perceptual Recalibration and Sound Change
Supervisor: Dr. Yoonjung Kang
Collaborator: Dr. Hironori Katsuda
By exposing listeners to innovative phonetic input, we explored biases in the perceptual recalibration of phonemic categorization, with implications for the role of phonetically grounded typological biases and word frequency encoding in exemplar phonology in diachronic sound change. The languages that we are currently working on include North American English and Japanese.
News
I will present my paper, co-authored with my advisor, Yoonjung Kang, at the LSA Annual Meeting 2026 in New Orleans!