Recent P-Lab graduate Chloe (Dokyung) Kwon (Ph.D 2026) will join McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) as a PostDoctoral researcher for Prof. Christian Brodbeck in the Department of Computing and Software. 

Chloe will work on a collaborative research project with Adderbee Research Labs, who have developed a cognitive architecture that using symbolic computation and continuous learning to model human cognition.  The joint project will improve Adderbee's natural language understanding by applying both cognitive and linguistics principles.

On June 5th, Ph.D. candidate Annabelle di Lustro and Professor Sam Tilsen gave a presentation titled "Voiceprints and Voice Disguises" to a packed and enthusiastic audience of Cornell alumni who were attending Cornell's Reunion 2026 celebration. 

Annabelle described her recent research on vocal disguise with whispered speech.  To illustrate her work, she played voice samples derived from her sound booth experiments. 

These samples consisted of paired whispered and paired normal voice samples.  She then asked the audience to guess if each pair was from one person or from two different people. 

For the easy pairs, the audience was almost unanimously correct, and for the most difficult pairs, the audience was evenly split - results that tracked with Annabelle's experimental results.

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. Photos - top (Jennifer Kuo), bottom (Yao Zhang).

The Phonemic Status Of Vowel Quality And Length In Saisiyat: A Phonetic Perspective,  Jennifer Kuo, Elizabeth Zeitoun, 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.