Hello! I am Mei-Ying, a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. I am originally from Hong Kong, where I was born and raised, before moving to NYC for my PhD studies.
I am a phonetician with a deep passion for prosody, particularly in tone and intonation. My journey into prosody began during my MPhil studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Although Hong Kong Cantonese has a complex tone system with six tones, intonation still plays a role. However, the mechanism of how tone and intonation co-occur was not well understood. My MPhil thesis focused on the co-occurrence mechanism of tones and the HL% intonation in Cantonese, and I was honored to receive the LSHK (The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong) Outstanding Thesis Award for my work.
I am also fascinated by articulatory phonology, speech production and perception theories. Recently, I have become particularly interested in how individual differences in cognitive functions impact speech production and perception. Also, I am intrigued by speech timing, which not only reveals how individual differences model speech planning, but also sheds light on broader speech production theories.
In addition to my work as a phonetician, I consider myself a computational linguist as well. My interest in information technologies began in my teenage years, and I am always curious about how computational approaches can be integrated with phonetic research. I aim to apply computational methods to phonetic research; and also use the findings to contribute to advancements in speech technologies (TTS/STT).
On a personal note, my Chinese name is written as 祁美瑩 (Cantonese pronunciation in IPA: [kʰei21 mei13 jɪŋ21]). A fun fact about my name: I also go by Zeta as my English name, and while nearly all my non-linguist friends call me Zeta, all linguists call me Mei-Ying instead, forming a simple and beautiful complementary distribution.
Last updated on Aug 30, 2024