The Phonetics Lab was well represented at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2026, which was held from October 9-11, 2026 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Kuo and PhD candidates Yao Zhang and Faolán Boyd presented the following posters:

• Evidence for the Maximum Onset Principle in morpheme segmentation; Dhanya Charan, Jennifer Kuo

• Source-language influence and cross- domain faithfulness in Nuosu Yi loanword phonology;  Yao Zhang, Jennifer Kuo

• Accent cues language-specific phonotactics in Spanish-English bilingual perceptual re-pair;  Faolán Boyd

(Photo caption - left to right - Faolán Boyd, Jennifer Kuo, Yao Zhang) 

On October 3, 2026 the Phonetics Lab spent a beautiful Fall Day birding at Cornell's Sapsucker Woods bird sanctuary.  During our guided tour along the sanctuary trails, we got to traverse varied terrain and viewed (sometimes fleetingly!) a wide variety of native and migratory birds.

After the tour, we spent time at the adjacent Lab of Ornithology building, where we admired bird-related art and shopped at a very cute bird-themed gift shop.  We also visited the Bird Discovery Lab, where we viewed exhibits on bird anatomy and spent way too much time at the interactive Bird Discovery table, where we listened to bird songs while viewing their real-time spectrograms.  

Afterwards, we had a lunch at the excellent Ithaca Ole Ole Korean restaurant and its authentic Korean cuisine. 

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).