Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology
School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences,
Newcastle University, UK
Email: cong.zhang@newcastle.ac.uk
Website: https://congzhanglinguist.wordpress.com/
Research Interests:
My research mainly focuses on aspects of speech prosody (e.g. intonation, lexical tone, rhythm), using a variety of approaches including:
- Phonetics and Phonology (Laboratory Phonology)
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational linguistics
- Language Acquisition
I received a DPhil degree from the Language and Brain Lab, University of Oxford. My DPhil thesis, supervised by Professor Aditi Lahiri, was about the intonational tunes in a tonal language — Tianjin Mandarin (More about my DPhil project).
I did my Master’s in Linguistics and Language Acquisition from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK). There, I worked on a number of projects including child language acquisition, second language acquisition, Mandarin lexical tone perception, etc.
For my undergraduate degree, I studied Translation and Interpreting at Beijing Foreign Studies University (China). I am therefore also interested in studies about translation and interpreting.
Following my DPhil, I worked as a TTS linguist (Linguistics Engineer) in A-Lab at Rokid Inc. One of my major projects was Singing Synthesis (text-to-singing). After this, I came back to academia and worked on the ERC project SPRINT (i.e. Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication, ERC-ADG-835263 ) and further looked into the aspects of English and Greek intonation in speech production.
So far, I have studied the subject of “language” from quite a number of different perspectives. These experiences are indeed very fascinating and inspiring for my future research.