About me

Hello!! My name is Xinyu /ɕɪn.ɥy/ (like “Shin-yu” in English). You can also call me Leslie. Listen to my name in Mandarin Chinese.

I’m a third-year PhD researcher in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Since 2026 Fall, I will serve as the student coordinator for the Phonetics and Phonology (Phon) Research Group.

I’m broadly interested in psycholinguistics, NLP, and (socio)phonetics. I combine computational, experimental, and quantitative methods to study prediction, adaptation, and information integration in speech and language processing. I am especially interested in how the cognitive processing of speech and language can be compared with, and modeled by, neural language models.

my CV is here: last updated in April 2026

Research

Surprisal effects in the information packaging of speech variation

Supervisors: Dr. Barend Beekhuizen (primary advisor) and Dr. Jessamyn Schertz

This project examines how computational measures of informativity predict how information is distributed across acoustic cues in speech, aiming to bridge large-scale LLM representations and fine-grained speech patterns.

Perceptual recalibration of speech

Supervisor: Dr. Yoonjung Kang

Collaborator: Dr. Hironori Katsuda

This project investigates how listeners adapt to novel phonetic input and how such adaptation sheds light on long-term sound change. Through perceptual learning experiments, we examine phonological and cognitive biases (e.g., lexical frequency and speech rate) in perceptual adaptation and generalization.

News

• I will present my paper about modelling language attitude in the probabilistic grammar of Heritage Polish (co-authored with Naomi Nagy) in NWAV 54.