Research

Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative approaches, I use a mix of phonetic, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and computational/corpus methods to study questions about social speech production and perception, phonetic variation and change, and bilingual sound systems. I am particularly interested in understanding the sources of individual variation that we see in speech production, perception and processing, especially those relating to ideologies and awareness.

Broad Interests

Specific Topics

Methods

Ideology, awareness, and sociophonetic perception in Asian American and Canadian (AAC) speech

My dissertation project centers on the ideologies of "sounding Asian (American/Canadian)" and how these affect the perception of Asian Americans and Canadians and their speech. In the first part, I explore the phonetic features that may be used by speakers and listeners to index or interpret Asian American/Canadian identity in perceptual impressions. In the second part, I empirically investigate AAC social speech perception, using this context further understand the influence of sociolinguistic personae and awareness on sociophonetic perception.

Variation in Asian & Pacific Islander North American (APINA) English

The English language practices of Asian and/or Pacific Islander North Americans have historically been underrepresented in variationist sociolinguistic research, though this is changing in recent years. Andrew Cheng (SFU), Pocholo Umbal (U of Toronto), Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (CUHK), and I co-organized a Special Session at the Linguistic Society of America's 2021 Annual Meeting to discuss current research on variation and change in Asian American and Canadian speech communities. Building off of that, we then sought to quantify the current state of APINA underrepresentation with a structured review of the literature with the goal of providing guidance for future APINA research directions.

Moving beyond "Native Speaker" in Psycholinguistics: Alternative approaches to language experience 

In collaboration with Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad and many others at U-M, I consider downsides to the use of the "native speaker" construct, advocating for psycholinguists and language researchers broadly to take alternative approaches to conceptualizing, measuring and discussing language experience.

Social cognition and individual variation in sociophonetic perception & processing

This research project, co-advised by Andries Coetzee and Jonathon Brennan (U-M), investigates the role of individual-level salience/awareness and cognitive processing style on sociophonetic perception. My testing ground for this uses social priming experiments of /au/-raising, a stereotyped feature of Canadian English, in Michigan listeners. In doing so, I examine the generalizability of social priming results from various angles, and consider the implications for sociophonetic cognition.

Cantonese consonant mergers in Hong Kong and Vancouver, Canada

In this project, I investigate Cantonese speakers' production and perception of the /n/~/l/, /ŋ̩/~/m̩/ and /ŋ/~null mergers in both Hong Kong and Vancouver. We use this data to examine various topics including the production-perception link, bilingual contact influences and the progression of sound change in diaspora communities. My collaborators include Molly Babel (UBC) and Yao Yao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), as well as Chang Liu and Stephanie Chung.

Publications

Presentations

Past Projects

LingTube: YouTube data processing tools for linguistic analysis

In collaboration with Mathew A. Kramer (U-M), I developed the LingTube pipeline, a set of Python scripts to help linguistics researchers automate the collection and processing of speech data from YouTube. Along with contributing to general purpose tools for scraping YouTube and screening YouTubers, I led creation of the YouSpeak branch of tools for audio-speech processing and phonetic analysis.

Language contact in Cantonese heritage bilinguals

Several of my projects have revolved around the topic of bilingual linguistic systems in Cantonese-speaking heritage bilinguals. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I investigated the early development of tone in a corpus of Cantonese heritage bilinguals under Peggy Mok (CUHK). After returning to Vancouver, I led follow-up experimental data collection of both production and perception in young heritage Cantonese children at UBC, together with Peggy Mok and Molly Babel. In a separate project at UBC, I also worked on investigating word familiarity across different speakers of Cantonese, together with Khia Johnson and Molly Babel.

Ultrasound technology in teaching and learning Cantonese 

In this project, I helped to create ultrasound videos for pedagogy purposes and tested the efficacy in the Cantonese language program at UBC, in collaboration with Heather Bliss, Murray Schellenberg, Zoe Lam, Raymond Pai, and Bryan Gick.

Lateral bracing across languages

Working under Bryan Gick and Murray Schellenberg (UBC), I led an ultrasound study examining the extent to which lateral bracing occurs during speech cross-linguistically.