Staff Profile
Dr Cong Zhang
Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5208
- Personal Website: https://tinyurl.com/2tcmps4x
- Address: Room 1.05 KGVI
School of ECLS
King George VI Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
UK
My name is Cong [tsʰʊŋ] Zhang [tʃɑŋ] (张聪). I am a Lecturer of Phonetics and Phonology at Speech and Language Sciences, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. I am also the Academic Lead for Student Employability and Enterprise for our school.
My research mainly focuses on aspects of speech prosody (e.g. intonation, lexical tone, rhythm), using a variety of approaches including:
- Phonetics and Phonology (Laboratory Phonology)
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational linguistics
- Language Acquisition
I received my DPhil degree from the Language and Brain Lab, University of Oxford. My DPhil thesis, supervised by Professor Aditi Lahiri, was about intonational tunes in a tonal language — Tianjin Mandarin.
I did my Master’s in Linguistics and Language Acquisition from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK). There, I worked on a number of projects including child language acquisition, second language acquisition, Mandarin lexical tone perception, etc.
For my undergraduate degree, I studied Translation and Interpreting at Beijing Foreign Studies University (China). I am therefore also interested in studies about translation and interpreting.
Following my DPhil, I worked as a TTS linguist (Linguistics Engineer) in A-Lab at Rokid Inc. One of my major projects was Singing Synthesis (text-to-singing). After this, I came back to academia and worked on the ERC project SPRINT (i.e. Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication, ERC-ADG-835263) and further looked into the aspects of English and Greek intonation in speech production and perception.
Please visit my personal website (https://congzhang-linguist.github.io/) for more up-to-date information.
- SPE1053: Linguistics and Phonetics I
- SPE2052: Linguistics and Phonetics II
- SPE8151: Phonetics I: Speaker, Speech and Language
- SPE8210: Phonetics II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody
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Articles
- Zhang C, Jepson K, Chuang Y. Investigating differences in lab-quality and remote recording methods with dynamic acoustic measures. Laboratory Phonology 2024, 15(1), 10492.
- Kim Y, Kogan VV, Zhang C. Collecting Big Data Through Citizen Science: Gamification and Game-based Approaches to Data Collection in Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics 2024, 45(1), 198–205.
- Coretta S, et al, Zhang C, Alotaibi NE, Halfacre C, Kelly NE, Turnbull R, McConnellogue C-AM. Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 2023, 6(3), 1–29.
- Zeng B, Williams EM, Owen C, Zhang C, Davies SK, Evans K, Preudhomme S. Exploring the acoustic and prosodic features of a lung-function-sensitive repeated-word speech articulation test. Frontiers in Psychology 2023, 14, 1167902.
- Sun Y, Zhang C. Task effect on L2 rhythm production by Cantonese learners of Portuguese. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüıstica Teórica e Aplicada 2022, 38(3), 1-32.
- Zhu J, Tian Z, Liu Y, Zhang C, Lo C. Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2022, 1134-1154.
- Zhang C, Jepson K, Lohfink G, Arvaniti A. Comparing acoustic analyses of speech data collected remotely. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2021, 149(6), 3910-3916.
- Wright C, Zhang C. Examining the Effects of Study Abroad on Mandarin Chinese Language Development among UK University Learners. Newcastle and Northumbria Working Papers in Linguistics 2014, 20.
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Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)
- Zhang C, Lai C, Napoleao de Souza R, Turk A, Boegel T. Language redundancy effects on F0: A preliminary controlled study. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2023. 2023, Prague, Czech Republic: Guarant International.
- Gryllia S, Arvaniti A, Zhang C, Marcoux KP. The many shapes of H*. In: Speech Prosody 2022. 2022, Lisbon, Portugal: ISCA - International Speech Communication Association.
- Zhu J, Zhang C, Jurgens D. Phone-to-audio alignment without text: A semi-supervised approach. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). 2022, Singapore: IEEE.
- Arvaniti A, Gryllia S, Zhang C, Marcoux KP. Disentangling emphasis from pragmatic contrastivity in the English H*~ L+ H* contrast. In: Speech Prosody 2022. 2022, Lisbon, Portugal: ISCA - International Speech Communication Association.
- Zhu J, Zhang C, Jurgens D. ByT5 model for massively multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. In: Interspeech 2022. 2022, Incheon, Korea: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
- Zhang C, Zhu J. Synchronising speech segments with musical beats in Mandarin and English singing. In: Interspeech 2021. 2021, Brno, Czechia.
- Zhang C, Wang X. Segment Duration and Proportion in Mandarin Singing. In: Speech Prosody 2020. 2020.
- Zhang C. Stacking and Unstacking Prosodies: The Production and Perception of Sentence Prosody in a Tonal Language. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 2019.
- Zhang C. Chanted Call Tune in Tianjin Mandarin: Disyllabic Calls. In: Speech Prosody 2018. 2018.
- Wright C, Zhang C. The Effect of Study Abroad Experience on L2 Mandarin Disfluency in Different Types of Tasks. In: The 7th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech. 2015.