Antonia ALVARES
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
Thesis (working) title: Investigating Khatri as a Contact Language
Antonia is working towards writing a descriptive grammar of the Khatri/Pattegar language with the aim of situating it within contact linguistics. The Khatri/Pattegar language is spoken by a small community in India known as the Saojis.
Supervisor: Prof. Kofi Yakpo
Co-supervisor: Prof. Joe Perry
Email: tonia9@connect.hku.hk
Clarissa KI
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
I am a PhD student interested in investigating language and music cognition. In particular, I would like to uncover how tone and melody in tone language songs are processed. I also have a wider interest in phonological acquisition.
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Email: clarissaki@connect.hku.hk
Qisheng LIAO
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
With a background in computer science and deep learning, I have worked on a variety of natural language processing and computer vision tasks, including semantic matching, language identification, text-to-speech, and text-to-image generation. I am excited to explore research at the intersection of linguistics and deep learning, with a particular interest in phonology and related areas.
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Email: qisheng.liao@connect.hku.hk
Ming LIU
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
I’m a PhD student working on phonetics and language acquisition. My research projects include: 1) lab experiments on non-native vowel acquisition, primarily using Ultrasound, 2) field work about sound changes in Hakka, focusing on tone sandhi and fricative vowel, and 3) computational modelling on multimodal learning of speech.
Supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Co-supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Email: mingliu_7@connect.hku.hk
Justin, Jialiang Ren
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
Research Interest: Language Variation and Change, Natural Language Processing, Agentic AI
Some Related Questions: Why do languages change? What motivates language change? How do we perceive and use language? What insight can language variation and change give when designing “JARVIS” that is capable of adapting to varying communication styles for a diverse group? How can the multimodal integration be optimized? How can we design the structure to ensure reasoning, learning, and adaptation while seamlessly processing vision and speech?
Supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Co-supervisor: Prof. Kofi Yakpo
Mentor: Prof. Ricky Chan
Email: justin.ren@connect.hku.hk
Frank, Lihui TAN
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
My research interest is in computational modelling of phonetic and phonological acquisition, its developmental dynamics and its comparison with human learning trajectories. My other interests include: 1) exploring sound representation learning in terms of linear and non-linear transformation; 2) rule and item-specific representation learning; 3) modelling of linguistic knowledge transfer and sound change.
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Co-supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Email: frank.lhtan@connect.hku.hk
Zhihao WANG
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
Research Interest: Phonology, Phonetics, Language Contact
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Co-supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Email: wzhihaow@connect.hku.hk
Shuhao ZHANG
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
I began my PhD studies in 2024 with a focus on phonological acquisition. Currently, I am interested in the acquisition of phonetic categories through the integration of different cues, and I would like to investigate this question using multiple methods, including neural experiments and computational approaches.
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Co-supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Email: shuhaoz19@connect.hku.hk
Shuang ZHENG
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
Research interest: Phonology, phonology-morphology interface, varieties of Chinese
Supervisor: Prof. Youngah Do
Co-supervisor: Prof. Jonathan Havenhill
Email: ivyzheng@connect.hku.hk
Zhiyin Zhu
PhD Candidate (Full-time)
Research interest: Second language acquisition, neural mechanisms underlying L2 processing of morphology
Supervisor: Prof. Yoonsang Song
Co-supervisor: Prof. Christophe Coupé
Email: zzy0504@connect.hku.hk