Hi, my name is Shengyue Xiong (熊声悦), which means "beautiful sound" in Chinese. I am a Ph.D. student in SoundBrain Lab in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University, advised by Prof. Bharath Chandrasekaran. 

I completed my M.S. in Speech Sciences at University College London and B.A. in English at Shandong University, along with extensive research experience at Columbia University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University. My interdisciplinary background in linguistics, speech sciences, NLP, and cognitive neuroscience has sparked my interest in brain networks that support human communication. 

Using a combination of behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational approaches, I want to explore the neurobiology of speech processing in a naturalistic environment. Especially, I'm interested in how the human brain overcomes variability in speech signals to form stable, meaningful representations. 🧠🗣️ Currently, my research focuses on: 1) Talker identification: How do listeners rely on low-level acoustic cues and adapt their decision-making strategies when identifying who is speaking across native/non-native/accented language contexts? 2) Phoneme categorization: How does the brain encode and map acoustic input onto linguistic units such as phonemes? What are the neural representations underlying individual differences in phoneme perception during continuous speech?

In the long term, I hope to bridge basic auditory neuroscience and clinical communication sciences by identifying neural markers that can inform early diagnosis and intervention for individuals with speech sound disorders.