On March 24, 2026 PhD Candidate Chloe Dokyung Kwon successfully defended her dissertation:   Korean word-medial stops and compound tensification: Acoustic and perceptual studies - see the abstract below. 

Chloe is shown here with her dissertation committee - co-chairs Drs. Sam Tilsen and Abby Cohn, and committee member Dr. John Whitman on Zoom.

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates word-medial stop realization in Korean through the lens of compound tensification — a process whereby a plain stop at the onset of the second noun in a noun-noun compound often surfaces as tense — through a production study of 32 speakers and a perception study of 94 listeners.

Acoustic analyses reveal that derived tense stops converge categorically on underlying tense stops rather than approximating them gradually, and that word-medial stop contrasts are maintained primarily through closure duration rather than the F0 and voice quality cues that predominate word-initially, suggesting a redistribution of acoustic correlates rather than positional weakening or merger. Listeners likewise rely on closure duration when categorizing medial stops; confidence ratings suggest sensitivity to phonological context, though this does not alter cue weighting.

Together, these findings disentangle categoriality and gradience in phonetic realization from variability, demonstrate that individual speaker variation is highly systematic and likely tracked by listeners, and suggest that positional differences in stop realization reflect differences in gestural timing relations rather than weakening or neutralization.

On October 9 & 10, 2025, Dr. Mark Tiede from the Yale School of Medicine conducted an intensive two-day workshop on ultrasonic imaging techniques at the Phonetics Laboratory. The workshop, which combined theoretical instruction with hands-on experimentation, introduced participants to the practical aspects of imaging the human vocal apparatus in real-time. 

The workshop's first day began in the Ultrasound Lab with comprehensive coverage of fundamental scanning parameters, including depth of field, sector angle, and frequency settings. Dr. Tiede demonstrated how these elements influence image quality and frame rates while addressing common challenges such as hyoid and mandibular shadowing.  

The second day  focused on more specialized applications. Topics included probe stabilization techniques using the ALPHUS system, co-collection of ultrasound data with intraoral EMA, and transverse laryngeal imaging for studying devoicing gestures. The workshop concluded with a  pilot experiment in which workshop participants could see their own vocal fold vibrations in real time. 

Everyone had fun and learned quite a bit over the two days, and a number of students will be applying Dr. Tiede's information to their own Phonetics lab ultrasonic imaging experiments in the coming months.

Phonetics Lab Ph.D. candidate Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao presented her ongoing research at BSMCS 2025 (the 5th Biennial Boston Speech Motor Control Symposium), held in Boston, Massachusetts from June 12 to June 13, 2025. 

Fengyue (Lisa) presented  research she conducted with Dr. Sam Tilsen - the paper title was:  "Unpredictable Temporal Auditory Feedback Perturbation Induces Lengthening, Not Compensation"

Phonetics Lab Ph.D. candidates Chloe Kwon and Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao presented their ongoing research at Interspeech 2025, held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands from August 17 to August 21, 2025.

Chloe Kwon presented her paper entitled “Speaker-specific Patterns of Phonetic Covariation in Korean Word-medial Stops and the Role of Phonological and Morphological Contexts”. The paper can be found here: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2025/kwon25b_interspeech.html.

Fengyue (Lisa) presented a paper on research she conducted with Dr. Jennifer Kuo - the paper was titled:  "The Role of Contextual Variation in Learning Cantonese Tones from Naturalistic Speech". The paper can be found here: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2025/zhao25j_interspeech.html.