Chenzi Xu

Profile

Biography

Chenzi’s research interests lie in phonetics, phonology, speech technologies, and tone languages. Her PhD investigated the prosodic patterns of unstressed syllables in Mandarin accents. Using quantitative modelling methods, it focused on the characteristics of pitch and rhythm, capturing structured variation in pitch with regard to linguistic contexts, information structure, and social identity. Her current interests are in automatic speech and speaker recognition.

Career

• Postdoctoral Research Associate - Person-specific Automatic Speaker Recognition
  University of York (2022 - present)
• DPhil (PhD) in Linguistics
  University of Oxford (2018 - 2022)
• MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology
  University of Oxford (2016 - 2018)
• BA (Hons) English studies for the professions
  Minor in Translation and Bilingual Communication
  The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2012 - 2016)

Research

Research

My research interests are in phonetics, phonology, speech technologies, and tone languages. I am interested in how different layers of information including speaker-specific characteristics and linguistic meanings are encoded in speech and perceived, using experimental, statistical, and computational approaches. Being a speaker of three tone languages, I am also interested in tonal representation, variation, and change. For more information, feel free to visit my website: https://chenzixu.rbind.io/, where I publish step-by-step guide on phonetic research topics including forced alignment, ASR, speech corpus, and reference management.

Upcoming projects

• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. 2024-2026. ‘The Rise and Fall of a Tone’.