CHENZI XU
徐晨子
About me
Hello, I'm Chenzi.
I'm a DPhil student in Linguistics at the University of Oxford and I specialise in phonetics. Speech sounds of all kinds never fail to fascinate me. Abundant information ranging from lexical meanings and discourse structure to emotions and speaker identity is ubiquitous in speech. I'm interested in exploring the ways different layers of meanings encode in speech. Some of the particular topics I have worked on recently are:
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Neutral tone
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Catathesis (downstep)
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Tone and intonation
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Focus and intonation
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Speech perception
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Plastic Mandarin
The vast variation and fuzzy boundaries of speech sounds can be daunting, but reveal that quantitative methods are conducive to representing and analysing sounds. I'm keen in experimental and computational approaches to phonetic research.
Before my journey at Oxford, I spent half a year at the University of California, Berkeley for academic exchange and about 4 years in Hong Kong completing my undergraduate programme in broad discipline of language, culture, and communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Growing up in a mountainous region in China, I was surrounded by a variety of Xiang dialects from an early age. When I was a child, mimicking different dialects was of great fun. It seems, however, the rise of Mandarin has been overshadowing many local dialects. Meanwhile, new regional Mandarin accents are emerging too. I am enthusiastic about maintaining language diversity and probing the social meanings of language varieties. I have been working on a Plastic Mandarin project and conducted fieldwork collecting speech data from urban high school students in Changsha, Hunan, China.
I worked as an intern at a tech start-up Mo Intelligence Ltd, during which I developed skills in building Android phone apps and some experience in speech technology including speech-to-text and speaker identification.
I enjoy films and gain energy from travels. Painting and cooking without a recipe are relaxing for me. Hiking, Bachata dance, and yoga are my nourishing activities. I am learning piano by myself and exploring how to take better photographs using my camera. As a child I aspired to be a writer, but unfortunately my blog is still quite empty without any updates for years.