PhD Speech and Language Sciences (school of ECLS)
Email: y.li218@newcastle.ac.uk
Google scholar page: <link>
Research Interests:
- Second Language (L2) Speech Perception
- Speech Processing
- Cognitive Mechanism of Learning
- Psycholinguistics
- Prosody
- Phonetics
- Phonology
PhD Topic: Incorporating a cue weighting strategy in lexical tone training: the effect of incremental cue training
Supervisors: Laurence White & Ghada Khattab
My work focuses on the perceptual learning of lexical tones in second language (L2) acquisition. Speech perception requires selective attention to various acoustic dimensions relevant to language-specific meaningful distinctions. One influential approach explains that difficulties in L2 perception was due to the automatic selective attention specialised for first languages (L1s) during exposure to spoken language in childhood. My project thus develops an Incremental Cue training method where a relevant pitch cue to a pseudo-tonal system was enhanced at training outset and exaggeration incrementally reduced block-wise. We explored conditions where the Incremental training might bring additional benefits than baseline stimuli exposure by mainly testing it on non-tonal L1 English listeners.
More broadly, I am interested in speech processing and cognitive mechanisms behind it. Some questions I ask: How are the rich and complex acoustic signals interpreted by the brain into meaningful phonetic cues? What’s the relationship between phonetic cues and phonological representations in speech processing? More specifically, which tasks/conditions activate a top-down or bottom-up process? And eventually, how are these processes learnt? Are there differences between the mechanisms behind L1 and L2 learning?
Please feel free to get in touch if you are also interested in these topics or if you have any collaboration ideas.
