news archive

Aug 5, 2026 New preprints!
πŸ“‘ Zhang, C. & Chen, Y. (2026) β€œThe interface of intonation and lexical tone: Boundary phenomena in Mandarin varieties ”. Forthcoming in Shaping Phonological and Morphological Representations: Diachrony, Acquisition, and Processing (Oxford University Press).
πŸ“‘ Zhang, C., Li, T., Dede, G. & Salis, C. (2026) β€œProsody and Voice Quality in the Connected Speech of Individuals with Latent Aphasia*”.
Aug 3, 2026 πŸ“‘ New paper accepted: Zhang, C., Zeng, H., Liu, H. & Zheng, J. (2026) β€œIntegrating Human Linguistic Insights into AI: Theory-Driven Representation for Multilingual Text-to-Speech”. To appear in Phonetica. [Preprint]
Jul 15, 2026 πŸ† Very proud that my Master’s student Lucy Smith won the Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation β€œMaking Speech Technology More Inclusive: Understanding User Needs Across Different Populations”! The project started from a research idea I proposed, and I’m now leading its next stage as we develop the work into a journal article.
Jun 23, 2026 πŸ“‘New paper: Li, Y., Hoogland, D., Duncan, D. & Zhang, C. (2026) β€œGamification in Phonetic Perception Data Collection: Accent Identification in North East England”, Linguistics Vanguard. This is the pilot project for the event reported by BBC/Mirror/Chronicle! Check out the project page for the new and nicer looking game!
Apr 9, 2026 πŸ“‘ New paper: Jones, S., Kim, Y. & Zhang, C. (2026) β€œPerceiving and modelling the scope of question focus in Korean”. Language and Speech. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309261419799
Feb 4, 2026 I made an IPA keyboard which does not show the three-term labels or arrange the symbols according to the IPA chart. This is mainly for digital phonetics exams or studying for exams. For anyone who has a phonetics exam on computer and needs a keyboard that doesn’t reveal all the answers:IPA Keyboard.
Dec 16, 2025 I have been invited to give a talk at Tianjin University. The topic is Speech prosody in linguistic analysis and clinical contexts.
Nov 4, 2025 Officially recognised as a 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐒𝐧𝐞𝐫 in 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐒𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐒𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 π‘πžπ π’π¬π­πžπ«πžπ π‘πžπ©π¨π«π­π¬! Happy to give workshops if anyone needs one for your team/department!
Oct 23, 2025 πŸŽ‰ We have been awarded a Research Assistant Grant for our Project Persian Utterance Final Intonation (PUFIN) by British Institute of Persian Studies (together with Niamh Kelly and Vahid Sadeghi)!
May 1, 2025 We are hosting a satelite workshop Prosody in Languages of the Middle East at PaPE 2025. We will also have a special issue for this workshop soon. Stay tuned!
Mar 27, 2025 Invited talk at HKPU: Tonal Tug-of-War: The Interplay of Lexical and Sentence Prosody. Recording available here.
Nov 10, 2024 Our Festival of Social Science event was reported by BBC, Mirror, and Chronicle! Glad to see many people loving our event too! Check out our project website here.
Oct 2, 2024 πŸ“‘ New paper: Xu, C. & Zhang, C. (2024) β€œA cross-linguistic review of citation tone production studies: Methodology and recommendations”. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 October 2024; 156 (4): 2538–2565. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0032356
Oct 1, 2024 πŸ“‘ New paper: Zhang, C., Jepson, K. & Chuang, Y., (2024) β€œInvestigating differences in lab-quality and remote recording methods with dynamic acoustic measures”, Laboratory Phonology 15(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.10492
Aug 10, 2024 πŸ† Our knowledge exchange event Wey aye, man - Think you know a North-East accent when you hear one? has been funded by ESRC to take part in Festival of Social Sciences on 2nd November at Farrell Centre!
Jun 19, 2024 πŸ† I have just won the Second Prize of Newcastle University’s Open Research Awards!
Mar 27, 2024 πŸ“‘ New paper: Zhang, C., Jepson, K., & Chuang, Y. (in press). Investigating differences in lab-quality and remote recording methods with dynamic acoustic measures. Laboratory Phonology. Preprint: (Link)
Aug 30, 2023 πŸ“‘ New paper: Zeng, B., Williams, E. M., Owen, C., Zhang, C., Davies, S. K., Evans, K., & Preudhomme, S. R. (2023). Exploring the acoustic and prosodic features of a lung-function-sensitive repeated-word speech articulation test. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. (Open-access link)
Jul 21, 2023 πŸ“‘ New paper: Kim, Y., Kogan, V. V., & Zhang, C. (2023). Collecting Big Data Through Citizen Science: Gamification and Game-based Approaches to Data Collection in Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics, amad039. (Free-access link)
Mar 21, 2023 πŸ† I was awarded a Pioneer Award by the Institute of Social Sciences, Newcastle University.
Oct 3, 2022 πŸ’Ό Started my job at Language and Speech Sciences, Newcastle University as a Lecturer (tenured Assistant Professor equivalence) in Phonetics and Phonology.