My research is primarily concerned with the basic mechanisms of speech production and perception in connected discourse, especially in terms of how multiple layers of communicative meanings can be encoded through a common process of articulation. In particular, I am interested in the production, perception, typology, and modelling and synthesis of speech prosody, as well as the basic mechanisms of coarticulation. I am also concerned with computational modeling of the neural process of speech acquisition. More recently, I have developed an interest in the understanding of emotional expressions in speech from an evolutionary perspective. For more information, please see my Research page.
Prom-on, S. and Xu, Y. (in press). Discovering underlying tonal representations by computational modeling: a case study of Thai. Journal of Chinese Linguistics. Request author version
Prom-on, S., Birkholz, P. and Xu, Y. (2014) Identifying underlying articulatory targets of Thai vowels from acoustic data based on an analysis-by-synthesis approach, EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing 23. doi:10.1186/1687-4722-2014-23.
Xu, Y. and Prom-on, S. (2014). Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning. Speech Communication 57, 181-208. On-line access
Cheng, C. and Xu, Y. (2014). Mechanism of disyllabic tonal reduction in Taiwan Mandarin. Language and Speech. doi: 10.1177/0023830914543286. Author version
Cheng, C. and Xu, Y. (2013). Articulatory limit and extreme segmental reduction in Taiwan Mandarin. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134, 4481-4495. Author version