McLing is happy to welcome a new cohort of graduate students to the Department of Linguistics!
Xuanda Chen is interested in phonetics, speech science and modelling speech flow using mathematical and computational tools. He completed M.A. at Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In his spare time, Xuanda enjoys anime, fiction, and music.
Alex Cucinelli who you may have seen around the department before the pandemic, is interested in language development, especially child phonology and L2 phonological acquisition. He previously attended Memorial University of Newfoundland for his BA and MA in linguistics.
Amanda Doucette is interested in computational phonology and how machine learning can be used to model how language is represented in the brain. They spent the past three years as a software engineer in New York City, and have a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Outside of linguistics, they spend a lot of time cooking, baking, and taking care of house plants.
Terrance Gatchalian has a B.A. in Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. His linguistic interests are in syntax, semantics, and fieldwork, and he has been working with Ktunaxa speakers for the last four years. Outside of linguistics, Terrance also enjoys hiking and photography.
Jing Ji’s current interests lie in the interface between cognition and perception, particularly the interaction between syntax, semantics, and prosody. She wants to apply computational methods to formalizing linguistic processes, understanding speech properties, and making predictions. She has research experience in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, mathematical linguistics as well as work experience in NLP.
Irene Smith is from Austin, Texas, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in linguistics and electrical engineering. Her academic interests include phonetics, phonology, and computational linguistics. In her free time, Irene enjoys weaving textiles, tending her herb garden, and backpacking in the wilderness.
Alex Zhai’s main interests are in speech perception and second language acquisition. She completed her B.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Carleton College.
