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Congratulations to Profs. Chang and Lindsey on receiving fellowships from the BU Center for the Humanities for 2022-2023! Prof. Chang was awarded a Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship, and Prof. Lindsey was awarded a Junior Faculty Fellowship.
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Prof. Chang will be in Porto Alegre, Brazil next week to give a short course on language attrition at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and a plenary address at the 5th International Conference on Language Attrition and Bilingualism (ICLA 5)! The title of his plenary is “Drift and attrition as a laboratory for testing perception–production links”.
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PhD student Meixian Li, along with Profs. Yao and Chang, published a new paper entitled “A corpus-based study of creaky voice production in English and Mandarin” in the Proceedings of Interspeech 2026!
Abstract: Creaky voice has been extensively examined across varieties of English, but cross-linguistic sociophonetic research on it remains limited. This study presents an acoustic investigation of creaky voice production in Mandarin Chinese and US English, using read-speech corpora comprising 66 Mandarin speakers (34F) and 61 English speakers (28F). Audios were processed via a pipeline of segmentation, annotation, cleaning, and acoustic analysis. 5,874 vowel tokens were measured for F0, H1–H2c, HNR35, and CPP over the 70% mid-portion. Linear mixed-effects analyses revealed men produced creakier speech than women in both languages. Findings contradict the notion that creaky voice is predominantly a feature of young women’s speech in US English but align with findings of more creakiness in men’s speech. We discuss the Mandarin results in relation to recent work on Mandarin listeners’ social perception of creaky voice.
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Prof. Chang will be representing the lab at the upcoming Interspeech 2026 conference in Sydney!
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Congratulations to Jupitara Ray on successfully defending her dissertation, “Phonetic plasticity in Indian English bilinguals: How L2 accommodation alters L1 production and perception”!
