Intro

I was born in Hong Kong in a town called Tai Po. I spent my formative years there until I moved to the US with my family when I was 15. When I first arrived in San Francisco, I spent one semester at Newcomer High School (an interesting social experiment, now permanently closed) before transferring to George Washington High School in the Richmond district of San Francisco. While I was at Wash, I also attended evening classes at City College of San Francisco through their dual enrollment program, which was really an eye-opening experience. I took classes in physical anthropology, harmony, planetary science, and calculus. I was quite determined to pursue a career in astronomy when I first got to Berkeley in 1995, but I quickly got sidetracked after George Lakoff's Ling 105 Language and Mind, which I took to satisfy the Philosophy distribution requirement. That class introduced me to the world of Cognitive Science and Linguistics. I was planning to declare CogSci as my new major, but then I took Sharon Inkelas’ Ling 115 (Intro to Morphology and Phonology), which convinced me that Linguistics is what I should focus on instead. Around that time, I was lucky enough to have landed a job as one of the part-time lab managers in the Phonology Laboratory. John Ohala, the director of the Phonology Lab at the time, was a very kind and supportive mentor who treated me as a full member of the lab. I got a front row seat to all the actions in lab (e.g., how to prepare grant proposals, how to carry out research projects from the beginning to the end, how to run a conference [the lab was busy preparing for the ICPhS in 1999 at the time]). This experience made me realized for the first time that it is possible for someone like me to pursue a career as an academic. While I was strongly encouraged by many to go elsewhere for grad school, I ultimately decided to stay at Berkeley. I was fortunate enough to be supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which allowed me to focus on research.

Berkeley was, and continues to be, a popular place for visiting scholars to spend their sabbaticals and retirement. I benefited tremendously from my interactions with these visitors, chief among them Juliette Blevins, Maria-Josep Solé, and Donca Steriade. They greatly influenced my thinking about the relationship between phonetics and phonology. By 2001, I was in the thick of dissertation writing. After an unsuccessful job-hunting season, I was antsy about having already spent 7 years at Berkeley and wanted to gain some fresh perspectives. I ended up taking a one-year position at McGill in 2022, teaching phonetics and phonology and historical linguistics. That year in Montreal was definitely an eye-opening experience for me, teaching full-time, adjusting to a foreign city by myself away from family for the first time, and desparately looking for a more secured job. It was a trying time, but I enjoyed living in Montreal tremendously, exploring this very vibrant city. I also had a great time hanging out with Mark Hale, Glyne Piggott, and Charles Reiss, and made many good friends among the senior grad students in that department at the time, particularly, Lotus Goldberg and Naoko Tomioka.

It was a small miracle that I managed to complete my first year of teaching full time and returned to Berkeley unscathed, and defended my dissertation, with the guidiance of my amazing advisor, Sharon Inkelas, and the very supportive committee members, Andrew Garrett, Juliette Blevins, and Johanna Nichols. A twist of fate led me to my dream job at the University of Chicago in 2003. I rose through the ranks, got tenure in 2008, and co-directed the Linguistics Institute, with the amazing Karlos Arregi, in 2015, and became a co-General Editor of Laboratory Phonology, the official journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. I had many talented students and collaborated with many wonderful colleagues, especially the incredible psycholinguist, Ming Xiang (I learned so much from her over the years!). I also chaired that department between 2023 and 2025. I was in Chicago for 22 years until another twist of fate brought me back to Berkeley in 2025, where I am now Chancellor's Professor of Linguistics and director of the very same Phonology Lab that kick-started my academic journey.

To learn more about my academic journey and my research interest, check out Episode 25 of the podcast, The Course

Publications

Books

9780199573745_p0_v3_s260x420 9780199573745_p0_v3_s260x420 9780199573745_p0_v3_s260x420 a-natural-history-infixation-alan-c-l-yu-paperback-cover-art

Journal articles

Book chapters

  • Yu, Alan C. L., Carol Kit-sum To, and Yao Yao. 2023. Child-directed speech as a source of phonetic precursor enhancement in sound change. In Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C. L. Yu (eds.) The life cycle of language: past, present, and future. Oxford University Press. 354-370.
  • Bochnak, M. Ryan, Emily Hanink, and Alan C. L. Yu. 2024. “Wáˑšiw“. In Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice (eds.) Handbook of Languages and Linguistics of North America. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 1201-1222. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712742-048
  • Oliver Niebuhr, Henning Reetz, Jonathan Barnes, and Alan C. L. Yu. 2020. “Fundamental aspects of perception of f0”. In Carlos Gussenhoven and Aoju Chen. The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody. Oxford University Press. 29-42.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2020. “The phonetics of sound change”. In Richard D. Janda, Brian D. Joseph, and Barbara S. Vance (eds.) The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II. 293-313.
  • Chen, Daniel L., Yosh Halberstam, Manoj Kumar, and Alan C. L. Yu. 2019. “Attorney voice and the US Supreme Court”. In M. Livermore and D. Rockmore (eds.), Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis. Santa Fe Institute Press.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2018. “Laryngeal schizophrenia in Washo resonants.” 2018. In Gene Buckley, Thera Crane, and Jeff Good (eds.) Revealing structure. Palo Alto: CSLI. 267-280.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2017. Global optimization in allomorph selection: two case studies. In Vera Gribanova and Stephanie Shih (eds.) The Morphosyntax-Phonology Connection: Locality and Directionality at the Interface. Oxford University Press. 3-27.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2017. “Phonotactic constraints in Chinese dialects.” In Rint Sybesma (ed.) Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Brill. 415-422.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2015. “The role of experimental investigation in understanding sound change.” In Patrick Honeybone and Joseph Salmons (eds.) Handbook of Historical Phonology. Oxford University Press. 410-428
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2013. “Typologizing phonetic precursors to sound change.” In Bickel, Balthasar, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson, & Alan Timberlake (eds.) Language typology and historical contingency. A festschrift to honor Johanna Nichols. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 395 – 414
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2013. “Individual differences in socio-cognitive processing and the actuation of sound change.” In Alan C. L. Yu (ed.) Origins of sound change: Approaches to phonologization. Oxford University Press. 201-227.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2011. “Contrast reduction.” In John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu (eds.) The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 291-318.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2011. “Mergers and neutralization”. In van Oostendorp, Marc, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds). The Blackwell Companion to Phonology. Blackwell Publishing. 1892-1918.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2010. “Tonal effects on perceived vowel duration“. In Laboratory Phonology 10. Mouton de Gruyter. 151-168.
  • Yu, Alan C. L. 2007. “The phonology-morphology interface from the perspective of infixation.” In Matti Miestamo & Bernhard Wälchli (eds.) New challenges in typology: Broadening the horizons and redefining the foundations. Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Good, Jeffrey and Yu, Alan C. L. 2005. “Morphosyntax of two Turkish subject pronominal paradigms,” (with Jeff Good), ed. by Lorie Heggie & Francisco Ordonez. Perspectives on clitic and agreement affix combinations. John Benjamins. 2005.

Other publications

Advising

Post-doctoral and research associate supervision

  • Tzu-Yun Tung (2024-Present)
  • Jinghua Ou (2018-2023, Program Officer, PICOR)
  • E-Ching Ng (2017-2019; Senior Tutor, National University of Singapore)
  • Zhigang Yin (2014-2015; Associate Professor at Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
  • Hyunjung Lee (2013-2104; Department of English Language Education, Incheon National University, Incheon, Korea)

Dissertation directed

  • Ziqi Chen: ‘New Immigrant’ Cantonese in Hong Kong: A Sociophonetic Study (In progress)
  • Pamela Sugrue(Senior Associate, Data Governance - Ontology & Data Modeling, Capital One): Influences on Irish Initial Consonant Mutation (2024)
  • Jacob Phillips (Information Architect, Grainger): Sibilant categorization, convergence, and change: The case of /s/-retraction in American English (2020)
  • Christina Weaver (Lecturer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Emphasis in Turoyo (2019)
  • Katie Franich (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Harvard University): The interaction of accent, rhythmic structure, and tone in Medʉmba (2017)
  • Julia Thomas Swan (Associate Professor in Linguistics, San Jose State University): Examining the effects of linguistic and social information on perception: Evidence from /ae/ in the Pacific Northwest (2016)
  • James P. Kirby (Professor for Spoken Language Processing at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the University of Munich): The role of probabilistic enhancement in phonologization (2010)
  • Fang Liu (Associate Professor, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading): Question intonation in Mandarin and English: A functional approach (2009)
  • Gregory Davidson: Modeling static and dynamic vocal fold asymmetries (2009)

Dissertation committee

  • Darragh Winkelman: On the genesis of Court Ottoman Turkish (In progress, Lenore Grenoble, chair)
  • Akshay Aitha: Domain effects in the morphology and phonology of Telugu: Boundaries between derivation and representation (2025, Karlos Arregi, chair)
  • Zach Lebowski: Intermediate constituents (2025 Karlos Arregi, chair)
  • Aurora Martinez del Rio (Lead Manager of Data Implementation, Urban Initiatives): Repetition reduction across the lexicon in American Sign Language (2023, Diane Brentari, chair)
  • Jackson Lee (Staff Data Engineer at Civis Analytics): Morphological Paradigms: Computational Structure and Unsupervised Learning (2022, John Goldsmith, chair)
  • Al Peters: Internal passives in Semitic: functional symmetry in a variation-and-change model (2020, NELC, Rebecca Hasselbach, chair)
  • Britta Ingebretson (Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics, Fordham University): Curating Value: The Politics of Language and Leisure in Huangshan, China (2019, Sue Gal, chair)
  • Rachel Lehr: A Descriptive Grammar of Pashai: The Language and Speech Community of Darrai Nur (2014, Amy Dahlstrom, chair)
  • Ryan Bochnak (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, starting January 2020): Cross-linguistic variation in the semantics of comparatives (2013, Chris Kennedy, chair)
  • Aaron Braver (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Texas Tech University): Degrees of incompleteness in neutralization: Paradigm uniformity in a phonetics with weighted constraints (2013, Rutgers, external examiner; Shigeto Kawahara, chair)
  • Andy Dombrowski: Phonological aspects of language contact along the Slavic periphery (2013, Victor Friedman, chair)
  • Morgan Sonderegger (Associate Professor of Linguistics, McGill University): Phonetic and phonological dynamics on reality television (2012, John Goldsmith, chair)

MA theses advised

  • Nick Aoki: Do Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris imitate the accent of their audeicne at campaign rallies? (MA in Digital Studies of Language, Culture and History, 2021)
  • Nicholas Mularoni: Autism spectrum disorder and variation of Cantonese /s/: an individual differences perspective. (MAPH 2020)
  • Langston, Elizabeth: Perceptual Compensation in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders. (Purdue University MA, 2014, external committee member)
  • Jonathon E. Cihlar: Database development for language documentation: A case study in the Washo language (2008)
  • Holman B. Tse (Assistant Professor, Department of English and International Languages, St. Catherine University): The phonetics of VOT and tone interaction in Cantonese (2005)
  • Anthony Yu (Director in Marketing at Renaissance Technologies): English language persistence in post-1997 Hong Kong: Subaltern support for hierarchical diglossia (M.A. in the Committee on International Relations, 2005)

BA theses advised

  • Yash Sinha: Schwa fronting in Hindi (2018)
  • Rafael Abramovitz: Postsyntactic vowel harmony in Chauchu Koryak (2015)
  • Matthew Faytak (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Buffalo University): The phonetics and phonology of fricative vowels: A typological perspective (2011)
  • Ed King (Software Engineer at Google): Generation effects on vowel production in Latvian-English bilinguals in Chicago (2009)
  • Nicholas Kontovas: An analysis of recent loans into the Standard Uyghur lexicon: What semantic distribution and phonological interpretation reveal about transmission environment (2008)
  • Justin Murphy (Education reporter at Democrat and Chronicle): Moraic alignment of f0 in Washo (2007)
  • Eric Morley (Senior Software Engineer at Google): Washo stress assignment and suffix ordering (2007)
  • Jeremy O’Brian: Consonants in Cantonese loanword adaptation (2006)
  • Marvin Lowenthal: Variable placement in Homeric infixation (2006)
  • Sun Mi Fountain: The benefits of implementing Hanja studies in Korean foreign language courses (2005)
  • Ted Strauss: Speech perception and the exemplar model of categorization (McGill University, 2003)

Current Projects

Behavioral and neurophysiological investigations of individual variation in cue weighting strategies (Previously supported by National Science Foundation #1827409 in collaboration with Ming Xiang and Jinghua Ou)

The perception of speech sounds often requires listeners to pay attention to multiple cues at once. The weighting of the relative importance of cues can nonetheless vary across individuals. Little is known regarding the sources of such variation, however. This project will investigate potential mechanisms underpinning such variability. The project will broaden the empirical database on which theories of speech perception and production are grounded as well as providing insights into first/second language acquisition and pedagogy in terms of the development of personalized training for individual language learners. The project will also introduce young women and under-represented minorities to STEM fields via the study of the language sciences through planned outreach programs. The findings from this project may inform clinical research on developmental or acquired perceptual and language impairments, and may also serve to inform research on speech related technologies.

This project focuses on two potential explanations for individual variability in cue weighting. Listeners might differ in early auditory encoding, which affects the reliability, hence weighting, of certain cues that support phonological contrasts. Listeners might also differ in cue integration strategy such that some utilize a continuous cue integration strategy whereby cue information is integrated as they become available, while others might employ a buffer strategy so that phonemic identification is postponed until all necessary information becomes available. This project will investigate individual variability in cue weighting using brainstem and cortical responses to speech sounds within the same individual, thus providing a comprehensive neurophysiological profile that underlies individual patterns of real-time cue weighting process, as measured with eye-movements

Comparative Cantonese Acquisition: Ethnic Minorities, Recent Immigrants, and Local Chinese Families in Hong Kong (in collaboration with Carol To at Hong Kong University and Yao Yao at Polytechnic University of Hong Kong)

Hong Kong has seen a continuous increase in the number of local children born to ethnic minority families with South Asian heritage and Chinese families that migrated from the mainland. These children speak a minority language as their mother tongue and belong to a minority culture within a larger community.

This project aims to examine the relationship between the language input received by these young children and the language the children are producing based on data in the Multi-ethnic Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (MeHKCC). Specifically, we seek to study the quantity and quality of the Cantonese used by the children towards their caregivers and the Cantonese input from those caregivers. Our specific aims are (1) to establish a comparative corpus of Cantonese child speech as well as child directed speech (CDS) between toddlers and mothers who speak a South Asian language, Putonghua or local Cantonese as first language (L1); (2) to demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative differences of Cantonese produced by these three groups of children and mothers as they interact with each other; (3) to identify the contribution of variant pronunciations in Cantonese among the three groups in the recent sound changes in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC).

The Linguistic Characteristics of Autism in Hong Kong: A Corpus Approach (in collaboration with Carol To at Hong Kong University)

There is a fundamental gap in understanding the nature of speech production in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), even though atypical language use is a core symptom in the clinical presentation and evaluation of ASD. The situation is even more acute for the speech production of ASD individuals whose native language is Cantonese as most research on ASD has been focused on English and other Western languages. Even within the Chinese context, ASD research has focused mainly on speakers of Mandarin, rather than other varieties of Chinese. The long-term goal of the proposed research is to further understanding of the precise phonetic characteristics of what constitutes patterns of atypical speech in Cantonese-speaking ASD individuals. The proposed research is significantbecause it will improve understanding and recognition of the clinical presentation of ASD in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. Ultimately, such knowledge has the potential to inform the design of diagnostic and assessment tools to better capture the presence and severity of ASD symptoms among native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. In addition, the methods proposed will enable analysis of more representative and ecologically valid natural language samples, and may create opportunities for discovery of currently unknown speech features in individuals with ASD.

Elements

Text

This is bold and this is strong. This is italic and this is emphasized. This is superscript text and this is subscript text. This is underlined and this is code: for (;;) { ... }. Finally, this is a link.

Heading Level 2

Heading Level 3

Heading Level 4

Heading Level 5
Heading Level 6

Blockquote

Fringilla nisl. Donec accumsan interdum nisi, quis tincidunt felis sagittis eget tempus euismod. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus vestibulum. Blandit adipiscing eu felis iaculis volutpat ac adipiscing accumsan faucibus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nullam adipiscing eu felis.

Preformatted

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';

Lists

Unordered

  • Dolor pulvinar etiam.
  • Sagittis adipiscing.
  • Felis enim feugiat.

Alternate

  • Dolor pulvinar etiam.
  • Sagittis adipiscing.
  • Felis enim feugiat.

Ordered

  1. Dolor pulvinar etiam.
  2. Etiam vel felis viverra.
  3. Felis enim feugiat.
  4. Dolor pulvinar etiam.
  5. Etiam vel felis lorem.
  6. Felis enim et feugiat.

Icons

Actions

Table

Default

Name Description Price
Item One Ante turpis integer aliquet porttitor. 29.99
Item Two Vis ac commodo adipiscing arcu aliquet. 19.99
Item Three Morbi faucibus arcu accumsan lorem. 29.99
Item Four Vitae integer tempus condimentum. 19.99
Item Five Ante turpis integer aliquet porttitor. 29.99
100.00

Alternate

Name Description Price
Item One Ante turpis integer aliquet porttitor. 29.99
Item Two Vis ac commodo adipiscing arcu aliquet. 19.99
Item Three Morbi faucibus arcu accumsan lorem. 29.99
Item Four Vitae integer tempus condimentum. 19.99
Item Five Ante turpis integer aliquet porttitor. 29.99
100.00

Buttons

  • Disabled
  • Disabled

Form