Phonetics lab researchers Dr. Jennifer Kuo and PhD candidate Yao Zhang presented papers at SEALS 35 - The 35th Annual meeting of the SouthEast Asian Linguistics Society held June 3-5, 2026 at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

Jennifer presented a phonetic analysis of Saisiyat - a Formosan language spoken in northwestern Taiwan - while Yao presented data from her field research on Nuosu Yi -  a Tibeto-Burmese language spoken in Sichuan, Southwest China.

Links to their paper abstracts are listed below. 

The Phonemic Status Of Vowel Quality And Length In Saisiyat: A Phonetic Perspective,  Jennifer Kuo and lalo' a tahesh kaybaybaw.

 
 High-Tone Avoidance In Nuosu Yi Tone Adaptation,  Yao Zhang

Phonetics Lab alumnus John R. Starr (PhD 2026) has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, where he will work with Dr. Jennifer Hu at the Glint (Group for Language & Intelligence) Lab. 

At Johns Hopkins, John will continue his work on computational models of language, human language processing, and how they interact.

Phonetics Lab researchers Annabelle di Lustro, Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, and Chloe Kwon presented four posters/papers at the 190th Meeting the Acoustical Society of America, held May 11-15, 2026 in Philadelphia, PA.  Their presentation and poster titles are listed below.

And following the ASA meeting, we learned that Chloe was awarded the Early Career Presenter Award in Computational Acoustics!

This prize recognizes excellent research and presentations skills from early-stage acousticians during the Technical Committee on Computational Acoustics sessions, and comes with a $250 USD prize. 

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ASA Paper:

Temporal localization of morphologically-conditioned stop categories in Korean: A computational approach, by Chloe D. Kwon and Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao (Cornell University) - Presented as a Contributed Paper at the Computational Acoustics: General Topics in Computational Acoustics Session.

ASA Posters:

Laryngeal devoicing gestures observed using transverse-oriented ultrasound, by Dr. Mark Tiede (Yale University), Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University), Dr. Laura Koenig (Adelphi University) and Dr. D. Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center).  Presented at the Speech Communication: Production & Articulation Poster Session (which was chaired by Phonetics Lab Alumnus Dr. Margaret Renwick of Johns Hopkins University)

Laryngeal elevation in native and non-native lexical tone production, by Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao and Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University) and Dr. Mark Tiede (Yale University)
Presented at the Speech Communication: Acoustics Voice Quality and Prosody Poster Session.

Prosodically-conditioned temporal variation in whispered versus normal speech, by Annabelle Rose di Lustro and Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Presented at the Speech Communication: Acoustics Voice Quality and Prosody Poster Session.

On Friday, May 8, 2026, PhD Candidate John Starr successfully defended his dissertation:  Dynamic Interaction of Linguistic Streams During Processing - see the abstract below.

John is shown here with his dissertation committee -from the left, chair Dr. Marten van Schijndel, John Starr,  and committee members Dr. Jennifer Kuo, Dr. Helena Aparicio, and on zoom Dr. Draga Zec.

Abstract:

It is well-established that people construct representations at multiple levels when processing linguistic input: for example, during and after reading "Where is my capybara?", people develop phonological, syntactic, semantic, and discourse representations of the sentence and its components.

The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how people contextually use and prioritize these levels of representations, or streams, during both on-line and off-line processing. Through experiments on three phenomena (phonotactic distinctions, word order preferences for binomials, and rhyme), I show how these streams interface with one another, focusing on how phonological information is incorporated with linguistic structures that are more commonly studied in the sentence processing literature.

Broadly, my findings support a model of sentence processing that allows for dynamic, incremental interactions between levels of linguistic structure.