Three Minute Thesis 2020 competition

Posted on 9 June 2020

Two LLS PhD students to represent the field of linguistics in the competition finals

The department of Language and Linguistic Science is delighted to announce that two of our doctoral researchers, Rui Qi Choo and Justin Lo, have been selected to take part in the finals of Three Minute Thesis 2020 competition.

In the event, PhD students across the university have just 3 minutes to explain how their ideas are expanding knowledge & understanding of our world and beyond.

Rui Qi Choo and Justin Lo will be competing to communicate the impact of their research to an audience and judging panel. All in under three minutes!

Music to your ears, words to mine - Rui Qi Choo (Education and Language & Linguistic Science):
My research looks at children learning 'musical' tone languages like Mandarin using a mix of longitudinal observation and experimental tasks. In this talk, I examine the building blocks of words in Mandarin (syllables and tones) and how children can attune to the 'musical' characteristics if they are important in the language.The findings provide insights into children learning languages with very different structures from the well-studied Indo-European languages.

Your voice, ta voix? Comparing voices across languages - Justin Lo (Language & Linguistic Science)
My thesis examines the comparison of voices involving bilingual speakers within a forensic setting. One of the potential challenges that bilingual speakers and communities pose is language mismatch between the voice samples compared. I look at how the ability of acoustic and phonetic features to tell speakers apart is affected in such cases.

The Three Minute Thesis finals will take place online on Wednesday 10 June 2020 as part of the York Festival of Ideas 2020.

To book your free place: Three Minute Thesis 2020 event booking

Part of @YorkFestofIdeas #York3MT #YorkIdeas