PhD Candidate Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao had a memorable summer at the gaming company Roblox, where she worked as a PhD Data Scientist on the Safety team, focusing on text safety and on keeping the platform safe for children playing Roblox games.
 

This experience showed that her PhD training in data processing, visualization, analytical thinking, and storytelling readily carries into industry.

Her work also pushed her to learn new skills such as:

• -handling data at scale
• -scoping ambiguous problems
• -thinking about technology's societal impact
• -working at an industry pace
• -collaborating across departments
• -incorporating feedback
• -experimenting with AI-assisted workflows.

As a linguist, she also enjoyed getting a glimpse into how language is used and evolves in multilingual communities at scale, far beyond the lab.

Fengyue is grateful to Roblox for this opportunity, and to everyone who made it such a meaningful learning experience. She gives a huge thank you to the Text Safety team, the Roblox Data Science community, Bridget Daly and Patrick Fang for their mentorship, Jenna Duque and Charlie Doria from Recruiting for their support throughout the process, and all the lovely friends she made along the way.

Fengyue is excited to carry her new perspectives forward and to see how this influences her research and her career plans.

The Phonetics Lab welcomes Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Kayla (KyungA) Lee,  who earned her PhD in English Language Education from Seoul National University in 2025. 

Kayla earned her PhD while working full time as an elementary school teacher in South Korea, and as part of her dissertation she conducted a large study of Korean elementary school L2 English learners.

During her time at the lab she will work with Dr. Sam Tilsen on a postdoctoral project examining how explicit instruction in English rhythm can influence young Korean learners’ speech perception and production. She will conduct statistical analyses of the data and connect her K–6 classroom-based research with laboratory research in phonetics and prosody.

By the time she leaves, Kayla would like to create a publishable paper based on her research, and to also gain more lab experience in other areas of phonetics research. Her long-term goal is to conduct research in ways that Linguistics can improve learning at the elementary school level. She is also interested in exploring how AI and technologies can expand the applications of linguistic research in language learning and education.

Kayla came to Cornell because she wanted to experience an academic environment in a laboratory known for its cutting-edge experimental phonetics and phonology. 

We look forward to learning with and from Kayla in the coming year! 

Also, Kayla is the latest in a series of Post-Doctoral researchers who have done experimental work in the Phonetics Lab.  These include Dr. Simon Roessig (Post-Doctoral Fellow 2022-2023) and Dr. Jeremy Needle (Post-Doctoral Fellow 2023-2025).

The Phonetics Lab welcomes Elina Hannecart, who is an exchange graduate student from the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS Paris-Saclay). 

Elina will be spending a year here as part of her first-year Master's degree, which is included in her four-year Graduate program at ENS Paris-Saclay. Elina has a background in social sciences (history, sociology and linguistics), and she is specifically interested in studying the relationships between language, sociology and culture. 

She chose Cornell and the Phonetics Lab for a year abroad for three reasons:

• -Cornell's support for exchange students
• -the Phonetics Lab's prominence in experimental phonetics and phonology research
• -the ease of conducting field research because of Cornell's proximity to New York City's many language communities.  

In her year here, Elina will do experimental work supervised by Dr. Sam Tilsen. Her projects will combine field research and web and/or in-person experiments to study the linguistic profiling of minority groups that experience discrimination. 

Her interest in linguistic profiling comes from her belief that linguistic normativity can infringe on human rights and on the way we perceive/treat other cultures.  To study this, Elina will record the speech of L2 English speakers here in the United States, then play that speech for native English speakers and have them "judge" the speaker based on the speaker's accents. 

Elina is well equipped for such studies, since she has knowledge of various languages (French, English, Spanish, German and Italian, as well as some Arabic and Portuguese), and she has lived in a number of European and Middle-Eastern countries.  

We look forward to learning with and from Elina in the coming year!   

Also, Elina is the latest in a series of foreign linguistics grad students who have come to study & research at the Phonetics Lab.  Recent such students include Hasini Makawita (National University of Singapore) and Leonardo Teixeira (Fulbright Scholar from Federal University of Ceará in Brazil).  uate 

Phonetics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow  Dr. Kayla (Kyunga) Lee (shown at left) presented her research findings at the 2026 PSLLT (Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching) Conference, held at Iowa State University from September 10-12, 2026.

Her poster - titled L2 Perception and Perceptual Confusions of English Fricatives by EFL Learners: A One-Year Longitudinal Study - presented data from a recent experiment she conducted with South Korean elementary school students.  For details, see the poster abstract below.   

Poster Abstract: 

This study examines how young Korean EFL learners develop L2 perception over one year, in relation to functional load and L1–L2 phonological distance. As Korean and English differ substantially in their phonological inventories, learners may experience persistent difficulty perceiving certain contrasts, which can affect later pronunciation and listening development. Participants were 112 Korean
elementary EFL learners in Grades 4–5 who completed identification tasks at two time points across one year.

The tasks targeted eight English fricatives (/f, θ, s, ʃ, h, v, ð, z/) across multiple vowel contexts using HVPT stimuli (Thomson, 2018). Responses were analyzed using confusion matrices and multidimensional scaling to examine perceptual patterns. Overall, learners showed improved L2 perception over time, with reduced confusion.

This overall improvement was also reflected in a decrease in the mean similarity of confusion (voiceless: 0.417 to 0.314; voiced: 0.483 to 0.414). The largest gains were observed for /s–ʃ/ and /ð–z/, while /f–θ/ remained the most difficult. Notably, high functional load contrasts did not consistently show greater improvement, suggesting that communicative importance alone does not predict acquisition.

These findings highlight the need for pronunciation instruction targeting learner-specific perceptual difficulty and underscore the close relationship between perception and speech development in young learners.