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). 

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.

PhD Candidate Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao has just published her paper in a peer-reviewed journal!  

Her paper - co-authored with Dr. Sam Tilsen - is titled  "Unpredictable temporal feedback perturbation dissociates mismatch detection from correction", and was published in the prestigious Journal of Phonetics (see the citation below).   

Fengyue's paper shows that speakers monitor the timing of auditory feedback from their own utterances and respond with perturbation-independent slowing to temporal perturbations.  

Her experimental results are significant, since it provides the first systematic characterization of phonologically conditioned speech responses to unpredictable temporal auditory feedback perturbations (UTFP), a relatively underutilized paradigm in which subtle temporal perturbations are applied at random times and random trials during speech production.

Unpredictable temporal feedback perturbation dissociates mismatch detection from correction, Fengyue Lisa Zhao & Sam Tilsen, Journal of Phonetics 118 (2026) 101519.  

Cornell Phonetics Lab researchers brought their latest work to LabPhon 20, held June 26-28, 2026 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where they presented the following seven papers and posters.

Top photo - Sam Tilsen discusses the articulatory evidence for ambisyllabicity.

Bottom left photo -  Fengyue Lisa Zhao (on the right, in a lavender blouse) presents a poster on laryngeal elevation in lexical tone production.

Bottom right photo - Annabelle di Lustro  (on the left, in a black blouse) presents a poster on prosodically-conditioned temporal variation in whispered vs. normal speech.

===> Presentations:

*Articulatory evidence for ambisyllabicity: a modern approach to an old question (presentation) - Sam Tilsen, Cornell University

==> Posters:

*Labial control and postural targets of labial and non-labial consonants - Peter Krause (California State University Channel Islands); Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)

*Laryngeal elevation in native and non-native lexical tone production - Fengyue Lisa Zhao; Sam Tilsen (Cornell University); Mark Tiede (Yale University)

*Low-tone faithfulness and high-tone markedness in Nuosu Yi tone adaptation - Yao Zhang (Cornell University)

*Prosodically-conditioned temporal variation in whispered vs. normal speech - Annabelle di Lustro; Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)

*The role of prosody in distinguishing meaning in English since-when questions - Youngdong Cho; Fengyue Lisa Zhao; Chloe Dokyung Kwon (Cornell University)

*Ventricular abduction observed using transverse ultrasound of the larynx - Mark Tiede (Yale University); D. H. Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center); Laura Koenig (Adelphi University); Lisa Fengyue Zhao; Sam Tilsen (Cornell University)