This Summer Phonetics Lab Ph.D. candidate Yao Zhang  conducted her second round of fieldwork in China's Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, where she worked with native speakers of the Yi language.

The Yi language is Tibeto-Burmese language that shares the same linguistic ancestor as modern Chinese.  Spoken only in China, Yi is no longer linguistically related to any Mandarin dialect, and Yao has been studying how Yi interacts with local Mandarin. 

Yao's research focused on tone systems and the loanword adaptations in different Yi dialects, and her fieldwork gathered language recordings from native Yi speakers.  A preliminary phonetic analysis of those recordings shows that: 

-Tone adaptation patterns in Nuosu Yi vary with speakers' bilingual proficiency, which correlates strongly with generation and education level.
-Older speakers in their 60s produced patterns that align with those generalized from corpus data
-Younger speakers in their 20s showed a marked preference for the innovative use of the derivative tone 4

This generational contrast highlights how language contact and bilingualism shape phonological adaptation in contemporary Yi communities.  Yao plans to further study this phenomenon when she returns to China in September for additional field research. 

Congratulations to Phonetics Lab graduate student John Starr, who was awarded both a Fellowship and a Teaching Award! 

John was awarded a Provost Diversity Fellowship for Advanced Doctoral Students from the Cornell Graduate School.  This fellowship is a competitive one‐term dissertation completion fellowship awarded to advanced Ph.D. students who have made significant contributions to Cornell’s core value to provide a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect.
 

In addition, John's excellent teaching performance resulted in a Cornell College of Arts & Sciences Russell Family Teaching Award. Recipients of this award have demonstrated their devotion to teaching, including classroom presence, course preparation and administration, student counseling, development of new courses, and new methods of student instruction.

Congratulations to Phonetics Lab grad students Yao Zhang and Fengyue Lisa Zhang who (along with fellow grad student Youngdong Cho) were awarded C.V. Starr Fellowships from the Cornell University East Asia Program.  These fellowships are awarded to Cornell graduate students whose work has an East Asia focus.  

C.V. Starr fellowships are awarded by the Starr Foundation - a charity started by insurance entrepreneur Cornelius Vander Starr.   The Starr foundation specializes in Asian arts and cultural philanthropy, but also makes grants in other areas, including education, medicine and healthcare, and public policy.

Ph.D. candidates Fengyue (Lisa) & Zhao and Yao Zhang presented their ongoing research at  TAI 2025 (the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation), held in Herrsching near Munich, Germany (16–18 May 2025).

Fengyue (Lisa) presented a paper on research she conducted with Dr. Jennifer Kuo - the paper was titled:  "Distributional Learning Across Contexts:  Learning Cantonese Tones in Naturalistic Speech" 

Yao presented a poster titled "Tone adaptation in loanwords: from Mandarin Chinese to Nuosu Yi".