There is a certain rhythm when we speak, and the rhythm sounds different depending on the language. By examining languages of different genera, we argue that linguistic rhythm can manifest in terms of prosodic properties like tone and stress.

Latest publications from ICPhS2019 in Melbourne (ICPhS_1847) and AMP2018 at UC San Diego (DOI: 10.3765/amp.v7i0.4480)

2018 PhD dissertation "The Iambic/Trochaic Law and birdirectional sandhi in Teochew languages" (HDL: 10722/280873)

With Diana Archangeli (UA), Stephen Matthews (HKU), Douglas Pulleyblank (UBC), Marjorie Chan, Björn Köhnlein (OSU), Zoe Lam (UBC), Andrei Anghelescu (UBC), Yuhong Zhu (OSU), Nohyong Kim (OSU)

This project is funded by Fulbright and U21.

Sound change can involve both speech production and perception. By conducting production and perception experiments for a sound change in progress, we examine the contextual neutralisation of (de)labialised stops in combination of different vocalic environments. We found that different acoustic cues are relevant, and the socioeconomic background also plays a role.

JASA 143:3 on production (DOI: 10.1121/1.5036470)

JASA 145:3 on perception (DOI: 10.1121/1.5101935)

With John Culnan (UA)

Some new varieties of Englishes have a distinctive tonal flavour such as the English spoken in Hong Kong, where most speakers are Cantonese. Phonetic evidence suggests that Hong Kong English has a privative /H, Ø/ tone system, where Ø syllables either receive derived tones or retain their tonal underspecification on the surface.

Selected papers from ICPhS2015 at the University of Glasgow "Intonation of statements and questions in Cantonese English: acoustic evidence from a smoothing spline analysis of variance" (ICPHS1018) and TAL4 at Radboud University "Tone spans of Cantonese English" (DOI: 10.13140/2.1.4875.9040)

2014 MPhil dissertation "Aspects of tone in Cantonese English" (DOI: 10.5353/th_b5481868) - Supervisors: Stephen Matthews (HKU) & Diana Archangeli (UA); Examiners: Moira Yip (UCL) & Cathryn Donohue (HKPU)

Among the many different linguistic features tagged in online corpora, some of them may correlate with each other. In particular, we re-examines Gil's 1986 prosodic typology concerning iambic and trochaic feet, and its relation to tonal complexities and word order type. With data from WALS, we perform statistical modeling of the coded data and explain the correlations in linguistic terms.

Upcoming: Talk at ALT14 at UT Austin!

Presentation at ALT10 at the University of Leipzig "Correlations between tonality and word order type" (HDL: 10722/192049)

With Stephen Matthews (HKU)