About me

I’m a first-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. The key question that I’m interested in is phonetic/phonological variation in speech production and perception. I use experimental and quantitative methods to investigate how phonetic, psycholinguistic, and social factors probabilistically condition the variation in phonological and phonetic grammar, and how this variability can inform us about the theoretical models of phonology, learnability, and evolution of sound patterns. Through this lens, I also hope to investigate some broader questions about humans’ memory organization and perceptual flexibility in cognitive science.

With my past training, I apporach these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially from phonetics-(morpho)phonology interface, psycholinguistics, and variationist sociolinguistics. my CV is here

Here is a list of the topics that I’m currently working on:

1. Perceptual Adaptation and Sound Change: supervised by Dr.Yoonjung Kang, I’m exploring the phonetic recaliberation/adaptation in speech perception with implications for usage-based models of phonology and mechanisms of diachronic sound change
2. Loanword Phonology and Cross-linguistic Perception: I’m interested in using constraint-based probabilistic grammar to model the adaptation of non-native sound structures by using dictionary data and on-line adaptation experiments
3. Sociophonetic Cognition: Drs. Derek Dennis, Jessamyn Schertz and I are currently working on social perception of prosodic variation
4. Sociolinguistic Documentation of Understudied Languages: My MPhil thesis focused on documenting ongoing sound changes in Tsat, an endangered Austronesian language in Hainan, China

I’ve graduated with an MPhil (Distinction) in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics at the University of Oxford, where I worked with Drs. Miriam Meyerhoff, Jose Elias-Ulloa, and Matt Hunt Gardner.

I’ll keep updating my research outputs here. Feel free to reach out :)