Research

UPDATE:

NWAV53 slides here! [link to slides]

NWAV53 poster here! [link to poster]

I am mainly interested in speech production and perception in multilingual settings. What are the factors conditioning how multilingual speakers produce speech sounds, how does this affect their speech perception patterns across multiple languages, and how does this lead to larger patterns of social meaning in multilingual language communities? I answer these questions from the lens of multilingual speakers in Malaysia, a contact setting where most speakers are early multilinguals.

My undergraduate thesis investigated accommodation in Malaysian English between Malaysian and non-Malaysian interlocutors. A portion of the findings have been published [here]. In my MA thesis, I examined the crosslinguistic interaction of stop voicing between Malay, English, and Mandarin by speakers of different dominance groups.

I have also worked on topics such as focus prosody in Japanese, nasal lengthening in Tswana, and stop voicing in Pashto.

More details below! Feel free to contact me (email) for slides or a copy of the paper.

Papers

Chan, Le Xuan and Annika Heuser (2025). Relative Cue Weighting in Multilingual Stop Voicing Production. Proceedings of Interspeech 2025.

Chan, Le Xuan (2024). Investigating Accommodation and Endonormativity: The case of TH-stopping and postvocalic /r/ in Malaysian English. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL), Vol. 30.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 51.

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Seunghun J. Lee (2024). Variable Pitch Accent and Prosodic Phrasing in Japanese Adjectival Complex DPs. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2023).

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Seunghun J. Lee (2024). Prosody of Corrective Focus in Japanese Complex DPs. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic, 1444-1448.

Chan, Le Xuan (2024). Thigh or Tie? TH-stopping and Laryngeal Contrasts in Malaysian English. ICU Working Papers in Linguistics 24: Selected Papers from the 7th Asian Junior Linguists Conference (AJL7), 71-80.

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Seunghun J. Lee (2024). The Intonation of sentences with an adverbial NPI varying in accent patterns. Proceedings of the 36th General Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 19–24.

Chan, Le Xuan, Asif Khan (2024). A Preliminary Study on the Acoustic Cues of Final Stop Voicing in Pashto. ICU Working Papers in Linguistics 18: Selected Papers from the 6th Asian Junior Linguists Conference (AJL6), 21-32.

Conference Presentations

Chan, Le Xuan and Annika Heuser (2025). Relative Cue Weighting in Multilingual Stop Voicing Production. Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Chan, Le Xuan (2025). Dominance in Linguistic Coherence: VOT and Vowel Quality in Malaysian English. New Ways of Analyzing Variation - Asia Pacific (NWAV-AP8), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. (Talk) [link to slides]

Chan, Le Xuan and Rebecca Lurie Starr (2025). Multiple Correlates of Stop Voicing in Malaysian English among Multilingual Speakers. The Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA 2025), Philadelphia. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan and Rebecca Lurie Starr (2024). Crosslinguistic Stop Voicing in a multilingual speech community: VOT among multilingual speakers in Malaysia. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV52), Miami Beach. (Talk) [nominated for Best Paper Award]

Furusawa, Rina, Le Xuan Chan, Seunghun J. Lee (2024). Focus Prosody in Japanese Complex DPs: F0 and Durational Cues. The 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19), Hanyang University, Korea. (Poster)

Chan, Le Xuan and Rebecca Lurie Starr (2024). Language Dominance, Transfer, and Attitudes: Malay VOT by multilingual Chinese Malaysian speakers. Sociolinguistics Symposium 25 (SS25), Curtin University, Australia. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Seunghun J. Lee (2023). Variable Pitch Accent and Prosodic Phrasing in Japanese Adjectival Complex DPs. The Second International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2023), Singapore. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan (2023). Investigating Communication Accommodation and Endonormativity: The Case of TH-stopping and postvocalic /r/ in Malaysian English. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV51). Queens College, City University of New York. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Seunghun J. Lee (2023). Prosody of Corrective Focus in Japanese Complex DPs. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023). Prague, Czech Republic. (Poster)

Chan, Le Xuan, Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Seunghun J. Lee (2023). Prosodic Realizations of Accented and Unaccented Postpositions in Japanese. Hanyang International Symposium of Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language 2023 (HisPhonCog), Hanyang University, Korea. (Poster)

Chan, Le Xuan (2022). TH-stopping and laryngeal contrasts in Malaysian English. New Ways of Analyzing Variation - Asia Pacific (NWAV-AP 7). Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. (Talk)

Lee, Seunghun J., Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Le Xuan Chan (2022) Intonation of sentences with an adverbial NPI varying in accent patterns. The 36th General Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan (PSJ 36), Kobe Gakuin University, Japan. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan (2022) Thigh or Tie? TH-stopping in Malaysian English. The 7th Asian Junior Linguists Conference (AJL7). International Christian University, Japan. (Talk)

Chan, Le Xuan, Keitaro Mitsuhashi, Kotone Sato, Rina Furusawa, Rin Tsujita, Seunghun J. Lee (2022) The prosodic realizations of accented words after NPI: Gender-based differences. Prosody and Grammar Festa 6. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), Online. (Poster)

Chan, Le Xuan and Asif Khan (2022) A Preliminary Study on the Acoustic Correlates of Final Stop Voicing in Pashto. The 6th Asian Junior Linguists Conference (AJL6). Sogang University, Korea. Online. (Talk)

Lee, Seunghun J., Céleste Guillemot, Le Xuan Chan, Mana Ashida (2020) Intonation of questions in Drenjongke (Bhutia). Prosody and Grammar Festa 4. Kobe University, Japan. (Talk)

Asai, Honoka, Le Xuan Chan, Kotone Sato, Michinori Suzuki, Seunghun Lee J (2021). A preliminary study of the prosody of Japanese DP with two adjectival modifiers. 言語学フェス Gengogakufesu 2021. Online. (Talk)