The Cornell Phonetics Lab was very well represented at LabPhon 20, held June 26-28, 2026 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  Sixteen alumni, faculty, and current students attended and/or presented research (see list below).

The conference Plenary event - titled "40th Anniversary of LabPhon - Looking back and Looking Forward" -  highlighted Cornell's prominence in Phonetics and Phonology research.  The Plenary featured four senior researchers -  Robert Ladd, Ioana Chitoran, Sam Tilsen, and Myriam Lapierre (see top picture)  - who discussed how laboratory phonology has grown and evolved. 

Three of these four - Robert Ladd, Ioana Chitoran, and Sam Tilsen - are either Cornell Linguistics alumni or current Cornell faculty, and LabPhon itself was first organized in 1987 by John Kingston (then a Cornell Linguistics faculty member) and Phonetics Lab alumnus Mary Beckman (PhD 1983).

Cornell alumni/faculty/students in the bottom picture from left:

• Alice Turk  (PhD 1993), Professor of Linguistics, Edinburgh University
• Marisabel Cabrera (BA Linguistics 2021),  PhD Candidate at UCLA
• Marc Brunelle (PhD 2005), Professor of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
• Simon Roessig (Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2022-2023), Junior Professor of Linguistics, University of Cologne
• Ioana Chitoran (PhD 1997), Professor of Linguistics, Universite Paris Cite
• Robert Ladd, (PhD 1978), Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Edinburgh University
• Abby Cohn (Professor of Linguistics)
• Sam Tilsen (Professor of Linguistics)
• Francesco Burroni (PhD 2023), Post-Doctoral Researcher, LMU Munich; special lecturer, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
• Fengyue (Lisa) Zhao (PhD candidate)
• Sireemas Maspong (PhD 2023), Post-Doctoral Researcher, LMU Munich
• Annabelle di Lustro (PhD candidate)

Not shown in picture: 

• Chelsea Sanker, (PhD 2016) Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor, Wellesley College
• Chloe (Dokyung) Kwon (PhD 2026), Post-Doctoral Researcher, McMaster University
• John Kingston, (Asst. Professor of Modern Languages & Linguistics, 1986-1990), Professor  of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts
• Yao Zhang (PhD Candidate)

Recent P-Lab graduate Chloe (Dokyung) Kwon (Ph.D 2026) will join McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) as a PostDoctoral researcher for Prof. Christian Brodbeck in the Department of Computing and Software. 

Chloe will work on a collaborative research project with Adderbee Research Labs, who have developed a cognitive architecture that using symbolic computation and continuous learning to model human cognition.  The joint project will improve Adderbee's natural language understanding by applying both cognitive and linguistics principles.

On June 5th, Ph.D. candidate Annabelle di Lustro and Professor Sam Tilsen gave a presentation titled "Voiceprints and Voice Disguises" to a packed and enthusiastic audience of Cornell alumni who were attending Cornell's Reunion 2026 celebration. 

Annabelle described her recent research on vocal disguise with whispered speech.  To illustrate her work, she played voice samples derived from her sound booth experiments. 

These samples consisted of paired whispered and paired normal voice samples.  She then asked the audience to guess if each pair was from one person or from two different people. 

For the easy pairs, the audience was almost unanimously correct, and for the most difficult pairs, the audience was evenly split - results that tracked with Annabelle's experimental results.

Phonetics lab researchers Dr. Jennifer Kuo and PhD candidate Yao Zhang presented papers at SEALS 35 - The 35th Annual meeting of the SouthEast Asian Linguistics Society held June 3-5, 2026 at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

Jennifer presented a phonetic analysis of Saisiyat - a Formosan language spoken in northwestern Taiwan - while Yao presented data from her field research on Nuosu Yi -  a Tibeto-Burmese language spoken in Sichuan, Southwest China.

Links to their paper abstracts are listed below. Photos - top (Jennifer Kuo), bottom (Yao Zhang).

The Phonemic Status Of Vowel Quality And Length In Saisiyat: A Phonetic Perspective,  Jennifer Kuo, Elizabeth Zeitoun, and lalo' a tahesh kaybaybaw.

 
 High-Tone Avoidance In Nuosu Yi Tone Adaptation,  Yao Zhang