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. 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 acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistic experiments, LLMs, information theory, Bayesian models of speech adaptation (ideal adaptors), large-scale corpus analysis, cross-linguistic phonetic/phonological universals, and theories of language variation and 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
- 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)!