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. My research integrates acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistic experiments, and computational modeling to investigate how speakers encode and adapt to variability in speech. In particular, I examine how low-level acoustic cues in the multidimensional space interact with higher-level knowledge and expectations from cognitive and linguistic system —such as those captured by large language models—to shape speech perception and production.
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 and Sound Change
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)!