LDL | Department of Linguistics | HKUXiaoyu presented at the CityU Phonetics and Phonology Forum (“Phorum”) on March 4, 2026, organized by the Phonetics, Acquisition, and Multilingualism Lab (PAMLab).
In his presentation “Learning Sound Correspondences during Second Dialect Acquisition”, Xiaoyu presented an artificial dialect learning study and an ERP experiment that examined the learnability and processing of sound correspondences.
Youngah visited ESF Kennedy School and spoke to the primary school children about our sign language project! She shared simple, practical ways everyone can help make our society more inclusive.
It was truly heartwarming to see how engaged and thoughtful the children were. We hope the session inspired them to think about both small everyday actions and bigger steps they can take to create a kinder, more welcoming, and truly inclusive world for all.
We’re grateful for moments like these — planting those important seeds in young minds is how we build a more inclusive future together.
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper by Samuel, Xiaoyu, Thomas, Bingzi, and Youngah. The paper, titled “Bilinguals’ Advantages in Executive Function: Learning Phonotactics and Alternation,” has been published in Second Language Research.
This study investigates the relationship between phonotactics and alternation in phonological acquisition and explores whether bilingual speakers have an advantage in learning alternation patterns that are not fully supported by phonotactics. Phonotactics refers to the legal sequences and structures within a language’s phonology, while alternation involves context-sensitive changes in morphemes. The research predicts that bilinguals, due to their enhanced executive function and multitasking abilities, will outperform monolinguals in handling multiple independent phonological pattern learning tasks simultaneously.
The findings reveal that bilingual participants successfully learned alternation patterns regardless of their consistency with stem-internal phonotactic patterns. In contrast, monolinguals only acquired alternation patterns with full phonotactic support. This suggests that bilingualism may confer advantages in managing phonotactics and alternation learning tasks simultaneously.
Sze, S. L., Yu, X., Van Hoey, T., Yu, B., & Do, Y. (2025). Bilinguals’ advantages in executive function: learning phonotactics and alternation. Second Language Research. open_in_new DOI
Our lab members recently presented in the recent LabPhon19 conference, held from June 27th to 29th, 2024, in Seoul, South Korea. The conference theme was “Where speech sounds meet the architecture of the grammar and beyond.” We presented findings from three distinct areas of investigation: phonetic substance in language learning, tonal representation in Hakka dialects, and the influence of naturalness bias on phonological variation.
