Phonetics lab grad student Yao Zhang presented a paper at the 30th Annual Conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL 2024), held at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea on May 25-27, 2024.

Her paper was titled:  Tonal contrastive hierarchy in Beijing Mandarin.  

The Cornell Linguistics department had a strong showing at the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19) , hosted by HIPCS (Hanyang Institute for Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language) at Hanyang University on June 27-29, 2024.

The following papers were presented by:

• -Faculty member and Phonetics Lab director Dr. Sam Tilsen
• -Current grad students Chloe Kwon and Fengyue Zhao
• -Phonetics Lab alumni Dr. Seung-Eun Kim and Dr. Francesco Burroni

---- Dr. Sam Tilsen ----

Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Is prosodic phrase structure planned? Evidence from phrasal lengthening, autocorrelation, and Markov statistics in spontaneous speech

Mark Tiede, Sam Tilsen (Yale University; Cornell University)
Temporal flexibility of articulation within syllables

---- Chloe Kwon & Fengyue Lisa Zhao  ----

Chloe D. Kwon, Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Phonetic evidence for compound tensification in Korean as a function of morphological context

Fengyue Lisa Zhao, Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Syllable Position Prominence in Unsupervised Neural Network Segment Categorization

---- Cornell Phonetics Lab Alumni Seung-Eun Kim and Francesco Burroni ----

Seung-Eun Kim, Qingcheng Zeng, Bronya R. Chernyak, Joseph Keshet, Matthew Goldrick, Ann R. Bradlow (Northwestern University; Northwestern University; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Northwestern University) - Quantifying perceptual similarity of connected speech

Seung-Eun Kim, Matthew Goldrick and Ann R. Bradlow (Northwestern U) Large-scale assessment of speech intelligibility

Angelo Dian, Francesco Burroni (University of Melbourne; Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich)
A machine learning investigation of durational and non-durational cues to stop gemination in Italian across regional varieties and speaking rates

Phonetics Lab member Nielson Hul has accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington at Seattle, in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature.

Nielson - a PhD candidate in Phonetics - will be the program head for the university's Khmer Language Program, and will teach all three levels of Khmer - beginning, intermediate, and advanced.    

Nielson accepted this position because of his enthusiasm for Khmer language education, and the fact that Seattle has the third-largest Cambodian population in the United States.  This community's presence will greatly aid Nielson's ongoing research on how English has affected Khmer language in the diaspora.

Nielson plans to complete his dissertation this fall, then will move his family to Seattle in December & start his new position in January, 2025.   We are sorry to see Nielson depart, but we are also happy that he's found a position doing the teaching and research that he loves.

The Phonetics Lab welcomes  Fulbright Scholar Leonardo Teixeira (pronounced tay-shay-dah), who will be spending the nine months of his Fulbright term here in the Lab as a visiting research student.

Leonardo is a Brazilian PhD Linguistics student at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), an institution known for its strong research programs and academic excellence,  located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará. He is among the 30 Brazilian scholars awarded the Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award (DDRA) to conduct research in the United States this year.

Leonardo came to Cornell because the Linguistics Department is a center of linguistics excellence in terms of its faculty and technology resources.  He hopes to apply those resources to developing a doctoral research proposal focused on how prosody develops in L2 speakers.  As part of this effort, Leonardo will work with Dr. Sam Tilsen on developing methods for describing, analyzing, and modeling L2 prosody changes. 

Leonardo came to Linguistics through his lifelong fascination with how language underpins our interaction with the world, and how language acts as an interface between us, others, and reality.  In addition to his interest in linguistics and phonetics, he also teaches Languages (English & Brazilian Portuguese)  at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Ceará (IFCE), an academic institution recognized for its comprehensive educational programs and research initiatives.