Antonia ALVARES
PhD Candidate
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
Kai U CHEANG
PhD Candidate
Drawing on a foundation in literary studies and digital humanities, Kai is interested in researching how computational literary analysis and natural language processing (NLP) could surface themes across online discourse and literary corpora.
Supervisor: Prof. Christophe Coupé
Email: kai.u.cheang@connect.hku.hk
Mingyao JIANG
PhD Candidate
My research interests lie in corpus linguistics, usage-based syntax, and discourse pragmatics. I am particularly interested in how grammatical constructions interact with lexical, semantic, and discourse factors in actual language use, as well as how these patterns vary across languages and communicative contexts.
Supervisor: Prof. Jesús Olguín-Martinez
E: u3014367@connect.hku.hk
Clarissa KI
PhD Candidate
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
Yihan LI
PhD Candidate
Research Interests: Linguistic typology, descriptive linguistics, endangered languages, language documentation, digital archiving, construction grammar, corpus linguistics, morphology, syntax and their interface, computational methods for language documentation and description.
Email: u3013122@connect.hku.hk
Qisheng LIAO
PhD Candidate
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
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.
Email: mingliu_7@connect.hku.hk
Jocelyn MCKNIGHT
PhD Candidate
Jocelyn is working on Cognitive Linguistics for emotions in West African Pidgin, with computational approaches. She will create a comparative cognitive-semantic account of the emotion domain across all six West African Pidgin varieties and will demonstrate how computational modelling can be fruitfully applied to low-resource contact languages. Her research interests are mainly focused on cognitive semantics, endangered and contact languages, Digital Humanities, and Old English.
Supervisor: Prof. Christophe Coupé
Co-supervisor: Prof. Kofi Yakpo
Email: jocelyn.mcknight@connect.hku.hk
Xingfang QU
PhD Candidate
My research interests focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language processing. I currently use simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of language comprehension in older adults. I am also interested in the neural mechanisms of syntactic processing and the use of neuromodulation techniques, such as TMS and tDCS, to investigate language processing.
Email: u3014342@connect.hku.hk
Justin, Jialiang REN
PhD Candidate
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. Kofi Yakpo
Mentor: Prof. Ricky Chan
Email: justin.ren@connect.hku.hk
Frank, Lihui TAN
PhD Candidate
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
Email: frank.lhtan@connect.hku.hk
Yike WANG
PhD Candidate
My research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience, where I use Large Language Models (LLMs) to investigate the neural basis of human language processing. By integrating computational modeling with neuroimaging data (e.g., fMRI and EEG/MEG), I examine how the brain represents and processes language during naturalistic comprehension.
Supervisor: Prof. Mohammad Momenian
Co-supervisor: Prof. Christophe Coupé
Email: yike.wang@connect.hku.hk
Shuhao ZHANG
PhD Candidate
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
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
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