The University Grants Committee has approved the use of General Research Fund this year for the following LDL projects.
Breaking down and rebuilding iconicity
Youngah will lead postdoc researchers and students in this project, which aims to understand the phonological and cognitive mechanisms behind spoken iconicity and its accessibility to a variety of language speakers, by training a neural network with ideophone corpus data to generate sound-meaning associations and test them in lab-based experiments with human participants.
Sociophonetic variation in Hong Kong and Heritage Cantonese
Jon will lead postdoc researchers and students in this project, which seeks to understand how phonological representation and sound change occur in bilingual communities. In particular, they will look at the sociophonetic variation of Cantonese sibilants among speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.