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 second-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My research areas include phonetics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modeling with computational linguistics tools. I examine the prediction, adaptation, and cue weighting in speech perception, comprehension, and production, and how these processes have implications for the cognitive encoding of speech in the brain, phonological and lexical representations, and language change and variation. My methodological approach combines acoustic analysis, large-scale corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments, and computational modeling, including the use of large language models.
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 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
- My paper (co-authored with Hironori Katsuda (Kansas) and Yoonjung Kang ) Do long vowels lead sound change? Perceptual learning of vowel shifts in Japanese was accepted as a poster presentation at LabPhon 2026
- I will present my paper (co-authored with Chenzi Xu (NTU)) Individual differences of cue weights in bilingual speech are correlated across languages and contrasts at the 38th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL)
- I was awarded First Place in the Student Abstract Awards at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting 2026 (co-authored with my advisor Yoonjung Kang)!