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Prof. Chang will be representing the lab at the upcoming Interspeech 2026 conference in Sydney!
The title of his talk (co-authored with Meixian Li and Prof. Yao Yao) is “A corpus-based study of creaky voice production in English and Mandarin”. It will be the last talk (10:40-11:00) in the Tuesday morning oral session on “Voice Quality Aspects of Speech”.
Congratulations to all!
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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”!
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Lab alum Dr. Felix Kpogo and Prof. Chang just published a new open-access article entitled “Age, gender, and locality effects on innovation in the Twi vowel harmony system” in Language Variation and Change!
Abstract: In this study, we explored social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.
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Congratulations to Prof. Chang on being awarded the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Science (Early Career Contribution Award) by the Faculty of Humanities of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)! The Chao Prize is “an international award that honours scholars and researchers who have made distinguished contributions to language science”.
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Prof. Yao Yao, PhD student Meixian (Vicky) Li, and Prof. Chang just published a new open-access article entitled “Social perception of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese: Everyone’s gender matters” in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications!
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities, but most existing studies focus on English, especially in the North American context. This paper reports a perceptual study of the social meanings of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese for mainland Chinese listeners. The study used a large set of resynthesized stimuli including multiple talkers and pairs of utterances differing only in voice quality (creaky vs. modal). Sixty Mandarin listeners completed a social perception experiment in which they collectively evaluated 38 talkers (presented in creaky or modal voice quality) on four socio-demographic dimensions (age, gender, sexuality, education) and 19 traits related to personality (e.g., confident, genuine, pretentious) and communicative style (e.g., engaging). Results of a factor analysis and mixed-effects models indicated multiple effects of creaky voice on the perception of talker age, gender, and warmth; further, these effects interacted with both talker gender and listener gender, in ways that often differed from previously documented patterns for North American English. These findings shed light on the multifaceted indexicality of creaky voice in Mandarin and contribute to mounting evidence of crosslinguistic and crosscultural variation in the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities.
