Natsumi Taniguchi

About me:

Hi! I am a third year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California, advised by Stephanie Shih. My interests lie mostly in the phonology/phonetics realm, especially in prosody. Recently, I have been working on information theoretic approaches to text-setting phenomena.

In American English, I usually go with the pronunciation [nɑˈt͡sumi ˌtɑniˈgut͡ʃi]. In Japanese, my name is written like this: 谷口夏美. I use feminine pronouns/agreement.

My research:

My research has mainly revolved around prosodic systems of languages and their reflections in music. My undergraduate thesis explores the text-setting of names in the Japanese Happy Birthday song in relation to the syllabic and moraic structures of the language. I am currently working on tone/pitch accent-melody correspondences in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese songs with an Information Theoretic perspective. 

(See "Research" tab or CV for papers and presentations)