Hello! I am a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I mainly work on phonetics and phonology, with a particular interest in multilingualism and crosslinguistic interactions in speech. Before graduate school, I received a B.A. in Linguistics and Computer Science as well as a minor in Philosophy from UC Berkeley.
I grew up in Beijing, China, and my family moved to Palo Alto, California when I was 13. In my free time, I like to play (video game soundtracks on) the piano, translate stuff, and spend hours walking around in big cities while listening to my playlist on loop.
You can reach me at cyntz@mit.edu!
A continuation of the pilot study I did in Linguistics 110, where I investigated the tonal variations on the negator bu in Mandarin-English code-switching (see the Projects section for details). I had the honor to be supervised by Professor Keith Johnson and SURF advisor Mary Shi.
my SURF 2021 Conference slidesSegment, align, and transcribe spoken Kuy data. Perform PCA and linear regression to analyze the relationship between acoustic correlates and social factors to test our hypothesis on the social causes of tonogenesis. Our poster, Multilingualism and Acoustic Correlates of Breathiness and Tone in Kuy, was presented at the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
Together with my partner, we recruited 32 English-Mandarin bilingual participants and ran experiments with them in the Berkeley PhonLab. More than 2000 segments of audio data were collected by the end of the semester, which I annotated semi-automatically using Praat and Python scripts.
research proposal by Alice Shen (graduate student mentor)FrameNet is a lexical database with context-aware word entries built upon the theory of Frame Semantics. Through this project, we modernized the lexical database of ICSI’s FrameNet project with vocabulary from film subtitle corpora and computed potential frame candidates for new lemmas using GloVe’s pre-trained word vectors.
https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.eduLead labs and projects that introduce 1200+ students to C, RISC-V assembly, CPU design, caching, parallelism, among other major ideas in computer architecture. Also host weekly discussions and office hours; write and grade exam questions.
Grade assignments and exams, hold office hours, and answer student questions on online forums related to operating systems and systems programming.
Assisted students taking the summer data structures course during labs every week, answering conceptual questions about algorithms and providing guidance for problem solving.
SLUgS hosts weekly meetings to unite language lovers across campus, and our activities range from PhonLab tours to grad school panels to language elicitation games. Every year, we also organize the Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium, providing a platform for undergrad researchers from around the nation to share their work.
slugs.berkeley.eduLead small-group mentoring section each week and work in a task force to help students with activities such as review sessions or video walkthroughs. I do my best to be a source of support for fellow students taking this computer architecture class that I particularly enjoyed.
https://csmentors.berkeley.eduWithin SAFTA, SNO focuses on organizing and hosting student-facing activities for Cal Performances events on campus with the aim to bring performing arts closer to the student body.
official descriptionIntermission is a student-run orchestra with 70+ members that plays music from video games, anime, and films. As music director, I oversaw the musical performance of this group, recruited new members, and coordinated communications among arrangers, conductors, and section leaders.
intermissionberkeley.comIn Mandrin Chinese, the negation word “bu (不)” is subject to a special tone sandhi from the neutral falling tone to a rising tone when followed by another falling tone. This project investigates this tone sandhi in a code-switched context, i.e. when the following word is in English.
An embeddable recorder designed for audio data collection on Qualtrics (this feature is not yet natively supported). Originally created for my SURF project.
https://github.com/cynthiazz/recorder-embedSome experiments I tried out to automate the massive and rather systemic annotation work for the Mandarin-English Code Switch project. A main functionality involves using Google's Cloud Speech API to generate a list of target word locations, then (semi-)automatically mark word boundaries on corresponding text grids with Praat's scripting language.
https://github.com/cynthiazz/praat_utilsWith the hope to help linguistics students study phonology, I started this project as a command-line Python program that filters the sounds in American English (i.e. IPA objects) by the Chomsky-Halle distinctive features. I launched a web version in the following semester for the final project of a web design class, winning the Staff Pick award.
https://dfsorter.github.io I got the idea to translate my favorite book series from childhood during a trip back to my hometown in Beijing. Magilian at Nightfall is an urban fantasy novel centered around a girl named Mao Dou, a mysterious milk tea shop owner named Rama who adopted her after her dad went missing, and a cat named Milarvoz Midoskaya.
Current progress: 2/14 chapters in Book 1
Voilà! This website was built with HTML, CSS, and jQuery; it is hosted on GitHub. Please see the Notes section for more information.
