Research

Ongoing projects

Javanese Phonology: a Corpus Study (Advisor: Prof. Colin Wilson)

Modern technology and the use of Big Data not only impacted the way we live, but also the way we conduct research, and this definitely applies to the field of phonology. This project aims to make use of databases, in this case, large speech corpora, to look into the phonetic and morphophonological properties of Javanese, an understudied language despite having more than 80 million speakers.

assisting Prof. Claire Moore-Cantwell, Learning Samoan Thematic Consonants Using Gradient Symbolic Representations

Smolensky & Goldrick (2016) proposes to use the theory of Gradient Symbolic Computation, which essentially claims that there can be partially present segments in the underlying representation, to analyze French liason. We use the same idea to analyze Samoan thematic consonants, which only appears when certain suffixes are attached onto certain roots. We speculate that Samoan-speaking children learn the consonants by updating the activity level of the thematic consonants from the root and the suffix whenever they have new input.

Thesis

Xu, S.C. Angela (2020). Cebuano Stress: Phonetic Cues and Phonological Pattern. [manuscript] (Advisor: Prof. Kie Zuraw)

Conference

Xu, S.C. Angela (2019). San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (SSdMM) Nasalization in Optimality Theory: Spreading from Nasal Vowels. Presented at SCULC 2019, at UCLA. [handout]