Yao Yao    姚瑶

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Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics department of the University of California at Berkeley. My main research areas are psycholinguistics, phonetics and corpus linguistics. I am also interested in language acquisition and Chinese linguistics. A copy of my full CV is available here.

Variation in spontaneous speech
Speech sounds are inevitably different from each other. Even the same word produced by the same speaker is different from one production to another. A wide range of factors have been shown to affect speech production, including age, gender, dialectal background, socioeconomic status, background noise, as well as speech rate, phonetic context, word frequency, contextual predictability, etc. A major part of my work is devoted to describing the general picture of phonetic variation in spontaneous speech. The database I am using the most is the Buckeye Corpus of conversational American English.

Phonological neighborhood
Words in the lexicon are not isolated islands. They are connected in multiple ways. One type of the connection is in the pronunciation of the words. It has been widely shown in psycholinguistic literature that words that sound similar affect each other in processing. This suggests that the activation of one word can be spread to other formally-related items (i.e. phonological neighbors) in the lexicon. What is interesting about phonological neighbors is that they can be both friends and enemies of the target word. Both facilitative and inhibitive effects of phonological neighbors have been found in previous research. My work concentrates on the effect of phonological neighborhoods in spontaneous speech. I am also interested in how phonological neighborhoods are developed in children's lexicons.

Phonetic acquisition and bilingualism
Together with my colleagues at UC Berkeley, I am working on a project which compares the production of both English and Chinese in heritage speakers of Mandarin, to that of native Mandarin speakers who acquire English as L2, as well as native English speakers who acquire Mandarin as L2. Heritage speakers, in the broad sense, refer to people who are exposed to a heritage language at home but have shifted to primarily using the dominant language. Most of our heritage speakers are from Chinese immigrant families in California.

Syntactic variation in Mandarin Chinese
A native speaker of both Mandarin and Shanghainese, I am also interested in the structure of the Chinese languages. My most recent project is on word order variation in Chinese dative sentences (in collaboration with Prof. Liu Fenghsi at Arizona University). This work is mostly inspired by the work by Prof. Joan Bresnan's lab at Stanford on English dative sentences. We build statistical models on dative sentences from Chinese corpora, and investigate the relation between surface form variation and the syntactic and semantic properties of sentence components.

Past projects

• Documentation of Southeastern Pomo
  
• Tone production in whispered Mandarin
  
• Syntax and semantics of the verb-copying structure in Mandarin Chinese
  

• C100BX Advanced Chinese for heritage speakers (Spring, 2010)
  
• Ling100 Introduction to linguistic Science (Fall, 2009)
  
• Ling5 Language and linguistics (Spring, 2008)
  
• C100AX Advanced Chinese for heritage speakers (Fall, 2007)
  
• C10AB Intermediate Chinese (2004-2006)
  
• C1AB Elementary Chinese (Summer, 2005)
  
• C10AX Intermediate Chinese for heritage speakers (Fall, 2004)