On June 5th, Ph.D. candidate Annabelle di Lustro and Professor Sam Tilsen gave a presentation titled "Voiceprints and Voice Disguises" to a packed and enthusiastic audience of Cornell alumni who were attending Cornell's Reunion 2026 celebration. 

Annabelle described her recent research on vocal disguise with whispered speech.  To illustrate her work, she played voice samples derived from her sound booth experiments. 

These samples consisted of paired whispered and paired normal voice samples.  She then asked the audience to guess if each pair was from one person or from two different people. 

For the easy pairs, the audience was almost unanimously correct, and for the most difficult pairs, the audience was evenly split - results that tracked with Annabelle's experimental results.

Phonetics lab researchers Dr. Jennifer Kuo and PhD candidate Yao Zhang presented papers at SEALS 35 - The 35th Annual meeting of the SouthEast Asian Linguistics Society held June 3-5, 2026 at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

Jennifer presented a phonetic analysis of Saisiyat - a Formosan language spoken in northwestern Taiwan - while Yao presented data from her field research on Nuosu Yi -  a Tibeto-Burmese language spoken in Sichuan, Southwest China.

Links to their paper abstracts are listed below. Photos - top (Jennifer Kuo), bottom (Yao Zhang).

The Phonemic Status Of Vowel Quality And Length In Saisiyat: A Phonetic Perspective,  Jennifer Kuo, Elizabeth Zeitoun, and lalo' a tahesh kaybaybaw.

 
 High-Tone Avoidance In Nuosu Yi Tone Adaptation,  Yao Zhang

Phonetics Lab alumnus John R. Starr (PhD 2026) has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, where he will work with Dr. Jennifer Hu at the Glint (Group for Language & Intelligence) Lab. 

At Johns Hopkins, John will continue his work on computational models of language, human language processing, and how they interact.

Phonetics Lab researchers Annabelle di Lustro, Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, and Chloe Kwon presented four posters/papers at the 190th Meeting the Acoustical Society of America, held May 11-15, 2026 in Philadelphia, PA.  Their presentation and poster titles are listed below.

And following the ASA meeting, we learned that Chloe was awarded the Early Career Presenter Award in Computational Acoustics!

This prize recognizes excellent research and presentations skills from early-stage acousticians during the Technical Committee on Computational Acoustics sessions, and comes with a $250 USD prize. 

Photos:

Top - Chloe Kwon. 

Middle from left:  Annabelle di Lustro, Annabelle di Lustro & Fengyue (Lisa) Zhou; Fengyue (Lisa) Zhou

Bottom from left:  Annabelle di Lustro, Fengyue (Lisa) Zhou

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ASA Paper:

Temporal localization of morphologically-conditioned stop categories in Korean: A computational approach, by Chloe D. Kwon and Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao (Cornell University) - Presented as a Contributed Paper at the Computational Acoustics: General Topics in Computational Acoustics Session.

ASA Posters:

Laryngeal devoicing gestures observed using transverse-oriented ultrasound, by Dr. Mark Tiede (Yale University), Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao, Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University), Dr. Laura Koenig (Adelphi University) and Dr. D. Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center).  Presented at the Speech Communication: Production & Articulation Poster Session (which was chaired by Phonetics Lab Alumnus Dr. Margaret Renwick of Johns Hopkins University)

Laryngeal elevation in native and non-native lexical tone production, by Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao and Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University) and Dr. Mark Tiede (Yale University)
Presented at the Speech Communication: Acoustics Voice Quality and Prosody Poster Session.

Prosodically-conditioned temporal variation in whispered versus normal speech, by Annabelle Rose di Lustro and Dr. Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)
Presented at the Speech Communication: Acoustics Voice Quality and Prosody Poster Session.