Hi! I am a phonetician and cognitive scientist. My main area of research is phonology and phonetics of speech prosody including tone, intonation, timing and rhythm, with a current focus on Western/Southern African and Sino-Tibetan languages. I also work on psycholinguistics, with a special focus on cognitive mechanisms in speech production and perception. My research methods combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and linguistic fieldwork. As a field linguist and educator, I am dedicated to supporting the communities by developing accessible linguistic resources such as well-annotated multimodal speech databases and pedagogical materials, especially for under-resourced languages. My current research is on a dynamical gestural approach to tonal, respiratory, and supraglottal aspects of sentence intonation production in African tone languages. My hobbies are cooking, taking pictures and making videos.

What's New

Zhang Y., Kumar P., Tian Y., Zhao Z., Shi X., Huang K., Lee K., Hsu H., Narayanan S., Nayak K., Goldstein L. (2025). Co-registration of real-time MRI and respiration for speech research. Proceedings of Interspeech 2025. 2175-2179. [pdf]

Shi X., Zhang Y., Lu Y., Ma M., Feng T., Toutios A., Hsu H., Goldstein L., Narayanan S. (2025). 75-Speaker Annot-16: A benchmark dataset for speech articulatory rt-MRI annotation with articulator contours and phonetic alignment. Proceedings of Interspeech 2025. 983-987. [pdf]

African tone language speakers needed

Let us know if you are a speaker in Los Angeles!

Links

USC Linguistics
USC Phonetics and Phonology Group
Dynamic Imaging Science Center (DISC)
Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group (SPAN)