Yao Yao: CV

Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies
GH626
Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

Education
2011	Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. University of California, Berkeley.
	Dissertation: The effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Committee: Keith Johnson (co-chair), Susanne Gahl (co-chair), Sharon Inkelas, Nelson Morgan.
2006	Master of Arts in Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.
2004	Bachelor of Engineering (with first honor) in Information Technology, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Publications (Journal articles \| Book chapters \| Conf. Proc. \| Other Conf. Talks \| Other )
Journal Articles
Yao, Y., Chan, A., Fung, R., Wu, W. L., Leung, N., Lee, S., & Luo, J. (in press). Cantonese tone production in pre-school Urdu-Cantonese bilingual minority children. International Journal of Bilingualism. [pdf] Wang, S., Huang, C.-R., Yao Y., & Chan, A. (2019). The effect of morphological structure on semantic transparency ratings. Language and Linguistics, 20(2). Yao, Y. (2018) NP weight effects in word order variation in Mandarin Chinese. Lingua Sinica, 4(5). [pdf] Shi, D., Zhou, M., & Yao, Y. (2017). 评价副词与背景命题 ——“偏偏”的语义与句法特性，《外语教学与研究》 [Foreign Language Teaching and Research], 49(6), 889-901. Chang, Y.-h. S., Yao, Y., & Huang, B. H. (2017). Effects of linguistic experience on the perception of high-variability non-native tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141(2), EL120-EL126. doi: 10.1121/1.4976037 Yao, Y., & Chang, C.B. (2016). On the cognitive basis of contact-induced sound change: Vowel merger reversal in Shanghainese. Language, 92(2), 433-467. [pdf \| materials] Chang, C. B., & Yao, Y. (2016). Toward an understanding of heritage prosody: Acoustic and perceptual properties of tone produced by heritage, native, and second language speakers of Mandarin. Heritage Language Journal, 13(2), 134-160. [pdf] Lin, J., & Yao, Y. (2016). Encoding emotion in Chinese: a database of Chinese emotion words with information of emotion type, intensity, and valence. Lingua Sinica, 2(6). [pdf \| materials] Yao, Y., & Shi, D. (2015). 背景命题及其触发机制 —— 从“根本”说起 [Background proposition and its trigger: The case of genben in affirmative sentences]. 《外语教学与研究》 [Foreign Language Teaching and Research], 47(5), 709-720. [pdf] Gahl, S., Yao, Y., & Johnson, K. (2012). Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(4), 789-806. Chang, C.B., Yao, Y., Hayes, E., & Rhodes, R. (2011). Production of phonetic and phonological contrast by heritage speakers of Mandarin. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(6), 3964–3980. [pdf] Yao, Y., Tilsen, S., Sprouse, R.L., & Johnson, K. (2010). Automated measurement of vowel formants in the Buckeye Corpus. 言語研究 Gengo Kenkyu, 138, 99-113. [pdf] Ke, J., & Yao, Y. (2008) Analyzing language development from a network approach. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 15 (1), 70-99. Back to top Book Chapters Yao, Y., & Su, Q. (in press). Chinese, food and menu. In C.-R. Huang, Z. Jing-Schmidt, and B. Meisterernst (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Applied Chinese Linguistics. Routledge. Ng, C. L., Lin, J., & Yao, Y. Polarity of Chinese emotion words: The construction of a polarity database based on Singapore Chinese speakers. To appear in M. Dong, J. Lin and X. Tang (Eds.) Chinese Lexical Semantics (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2016). Heidelberg: Springer. Huang, C-R., & Yao, Y. (2015). Corpus Linguistics. In: James D. Wright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 4, pp. 949–953. Oxford: Elsevier. Lin, J., & Yao, Y. (2014). Categorization and Intensity of Chinese Emotion. In X. Su and T. He (Eds.), Chinese Lexical Semantics (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2014), pp. 181-190. Heidelberg: Springer. Back to top Conference Proceedings Chen, Z. Q., Yao, Y., & Yu, A. C. L. (2018). Changing against tone merging trends in community? The case of C. Y. Leung. Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing (PACLIC32). Hong Kong, December 1 -3, 2018. Yao, Y., & Sharma, B. (2017). What is in the neighborhood of a tonal syllable? Evidence from auditory lexical decision in Mandarin Chinese. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Vol 2, Austin, TX, Jan 5-8, 2017. [talk \| paper] Huang, C-R., Wang, S., Yao, Y., & Chan, A. (2016). Crowdsourcing, word segmentation, and semantic transparency: A new empirical approach to Chinese linguistics. Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-15), Taiwan, May 27-29, 2016. Ng, C. L., Lin, J., & Yao, Y. (2016). 汉语情感词的极性：基于新加坡华语使用者的情感词极性词库. Proceedings of the 17th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW2016), Singapore, May 20-22, 2016. Yao, Y. A review of corpus-based statistical models of language variation. Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing (PACLIC29), Shanghai, China, Oct 30 - Nov 1, 2015. Wang, S., Huang, C-R., Yao, Y., & Chan, A. (2015). Mechanical Turk-based experiment vs laboratory-based experiment: A case study on the comparison of semantic transparency rating data. Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing (PACLIC29), Shanghai, China, Oct 30 - Nov 1, 2015. Prévot, L., Yao, Y., Gingold, A., Bel, B., & Chan, K. Y. J. (2015). Toward a scary comparative corpus: The Werewolf Spoken Corpus. Proceedings of the Workshop Series on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2015), Gothenburg, Sweden, Aug 24-26, 2015. Lin, J., & Yao, Y. (2015). Encoding emotion in Chinese: Category and intensity of Chinese emotion words. Proceedings of the 16th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW2015), Beijing, China, May 9-10, 2015. Sharma, B., Liu, C., & Yao, Y. (2015) Perceptual confusability of Mandarin sounds, tones and syllables. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Science (ICPhS), Glasgow, UK, Aug 10-14, 2015. Yao, Y. (2014). Predicting the use of BA construction in Mandarin Chinese discourse: A modeling study with two verbs. Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing (PACLIC28), Phuket, Thailand, December 12-14, 2014. Wang S., Huang, C.-R., Yao, Y., & Chan, A. (2014). Exploring Mental Lexicon in an Efficient and Economic Way: Crowdsourcing for Linguistic Experiments. Proceedings from the workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex) at the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING25), Dublin, Ireland, Aug 23-29, 2014. Wang S., Huang, C.-R., Yao, Y., & Chan, A. (2014). Building a semantic transparency dataset of Chinese nominal compounds: A practice of crowdsourcing methodology. Proceedings from the workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resources for Language processing (LG-LP) at the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING25), Dublin, Ireland, Aug 23-29, 2014. Yao, Y., Liu, F.-H. (2010). A working report on statistically modeling dative variation in Mandarin Chinese. Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Lingusitics (COLING 2010), Beijing, China. Yao, Y. (2009a). An Exemplar-based approach to automatic burst detection in spontaneous speech. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII), Seoul, South Korea. Yao, Y. (2009b). Understanding VOT variation in spontaneous speech. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII), Seoul, South Korea. Yao, Y, Chang, C.B., Katseff, S., Lee-Goldman, R., & Piqueras-Brunet, M. (2009). A web-accessible dictionary of Southeastern Pomo. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII), Seoul, South Korea. Chang, C.B., Yao, Y., Haynes E.F., & Rhodes, R. (2009). The phonetic space of phonological categories in heritage speakers of Mandarin. In Malcolm Elliott et al. (eds.), Proceedings from the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session, 31-45. Chicago, IL. Chang, C.B., Yao, Y., Haynes E.F., & Rhodes, R. (2009). A tale of five fricatives: Consonantal contrast in heritage speakers of Mandarin. In Laurel MacKenzie (ed.), University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 15(1), 37-43. Philadelphia, PA: Penn Linguistics Club. Chang, C.B., & Yao, Y.. (2007). Tone production in whispered Mandarin. In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI), 1085-88. Saarbrucken, Germany. Yao, Y. (2007). Double nominative construction revisited - a corpus-based study on the semantic interpretation of Chinese topic sentences. In Proceedings from the 8th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW08), Hong Kong. Back to top Other Conference Talks Sharma, B., & Yao, Y.. (2018). Effect of homophone density in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Mandarin. Oral presentation at the 16th Laboratory Phonology Conference, Lisbon, June 20-22, 2018. [talk] Yao, Y., & Yu, A.C.L. (2017). An online survey of phonetic variation in Hong Kong Cantonese. The 16th conference on Methods in Dialectology, Tokyo, JP, Aug 7-11, 2017. Luo, J., & Yao, Y. (2017). Undoing the “lazy accent”: Gender, age and language attitude in reversing Hong Kong Cantonese tone merger via phonetic imitation. Poster at the 4th International Workshop on Sound Change (WSC4), Edinburgh, UK, Apr 19-22, 2017. Yao, Y., Prevot, L, & Meunier, C. (2016). Chasing the frequency effect: Durational variation of function words in conversational French. The 16th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Symposium on the Role of Predictability in Shaping Human Language Systems. Sydney, Australia, Dec 7-10, 2016. Yao, Y., & Shi, D. (2015). Understanding sentence implications triggered by genben and benlai. Oral presentation at the 23rd annual conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics & the 1st International Symposium on Sino-Korean Linguistics (IACL23 & ISSKL-1), Seoul, Korea, Aug 26-28, 2015. Yao, Y. & Meunier, C. (2014). Effects of phonological neighborhood density on phonetic variation: The curious case of French. Oral presentation at the 14th Laboratory Phonology Conference, Tokyo, July 25-27, 2014. Yao, Y. (2014). Within-speaker variation in recent sound changes in Hong Kong Cantonese. Oral presentation at the 22nd annual conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics & 26th annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (IACL-22 & NACCL-26), College Park, MD, May 2-4, 2014. Lin, Jingxia & Yao, Y. (2014). An Online Survey on Emotion Category and Intensity of Chinese Emotion Words. Oral presentation at the 22nd annual conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics & 26th annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (IACL-22 & NACCL-26), College Park, MD, May 2-4, 2014. Yao, Y., Lin, J., & Huang, C.-R. (2013). Lexicalized emotion? - Tonal patterns of emotion words in Chinese. Oral presentaiton at the 25th annual conference of North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-25), Ann Arbor, MI, June 21-23, 2013. Yao, Y. (2012). Dividing after uniting? An investigation of an ongoing vowel split in Shanghainese. Oral presentation at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL20), Hong Kong, August 29-31, 2012. Yao, Y. & Chang, C. B. (2012). Reversal of a merger via cross-language influence: The case of Shanghainese and Mandarin. Poster presentation at the 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 13), Stuttgart, Germany, July 27-29, 2012. Back to top Other publications Yao, Y. (2007). Closure duration and VOT of word-initial voiceless plosives in English in spontaneous connected speech. In UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report for 2007, pp.183-225. [pdf] Back to top