About me

My name is Xinyu Liao. I’m a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. I’m interested in phonetics and psycholinguistics. The central focus of my research is speech variability in production and perception, bridging psycholinguistic experiments, computational modeling, large-scale corpus analysis, cross-linguistic phonetic universals, and language change in cultural evolution.

With my past training, I apporach these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially from phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, computational modeling, and variationist sociolinguistics. my CV is here

Research

Perceptual Recalibration and Sound Change

By exposing listeners to innovative phonetic input, I explore biases in the phonetic recalibration of phonemic categorization, with implications for episodic exemplar models of phonology, and the role of acoustic memory and word frequency encoding in diachronic sound change

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