Staff Profile
Dr Cong Zhang
Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology
- Email: cong.zhang@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5208
- Personal Website: https://congzhanglinguist.wordpress.com/
- Address: Room 1.05 KGVI
School of ECLS
King George VI Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
UK
Background
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 (More about my DPhil project).
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.
Teaching
Undergraduate Teaching
- SPE1053: Linguistics and Phonetics I
- SPE2052: Linguistics and Phonetics II
Postgraduate Teaching
- SPE8151: Phonetics I: Speaker, Speech and Language
- SPE8210: Phonetics II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody