PAMLab at CityU

PAMLab at CityU

A research cluster in the Department of Linguistics and Translation

Welcome to the Fall 2026 labbies!

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Welcome to the three new students joining the lab this semester:

  • Cheryl Chan (CityU '26) is a recent graduate of the BA in Linguistics and Language Applications at City University of Hong Kong. She will be a research intern in the lab, working with PhD alum Jupitara Ray. Her research interests include the experimental study of tone and speech perception, as well as the acoustic and prosodic aspects of meaning-making in naturalistic discourse.
  • Zhuangcheng Gao (CityU '30) is a first-year PhD student in Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. A graduate of Hunan Normal University and Wuhan University, he is broadly interested in phonetics and phonology, pragmatics, bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Currently, he is working on aspects of code-switching between Mandarin and English.
  • Tianqi Ju (PolyU '30) a first-year PhD student in Language Science and Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, co-supervised by Profs. Yao Yao and Charles Chang. Her previous work looked at cross-linguistic influence in Chinese multilingual speakers, with a focus on both speech production and perception. Her research interests include phonetics, multilingualism, and language acquisition.

And a warm welcome back to Vicky!

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Li, Yao, & Chang in Proceedings of Interspeech

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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.

Ray defends PhD

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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”!