Staff Profile

My name is Cong [tsʰʊŋ] Zhang [tʃɑŋ] (张聪). 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 the 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

• Articles

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

• 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.