Chenzi Xu

Dr. Chenzi Xu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Clarendon Institute within the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Their research focuses on prosody, speech production/perception, and the intersection of speech processing with forensic linguistics. Dr. Xu's work employs quantitative methods to analyze voice quality, pitch variation, and sociolinguistic identity markers in Mandarin dialects, particularly 'Plastic Mandarin.'

Education: Their doctoral (DPhil) research investigated prosodic patterns in unstressed syllables of regional Mandarin accents, combining acoustic analysis with sociolinguistic factors. This work emphasizes structured variation in pitch and voice quality across linguistic contexts and social identities.

Research Interests: Dr. Xu explores automatic speech recognition systems' sensitivity to vocal variation, forensic speaker recognition, and cross-linguistic tonal phenomena. Their work bridges computational modeling and experimental psychology, as seen in studies on mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to consonant durations and ERP evidence of Mandarin sibilant perception.

Key Research Themes: Their publications address prosodic analysis in Bengali question intonation, vocal quality in telephony speech, and methodological improvements in citation tone studies. Recent work (2023-2024) emphasizes forensic applications of speaker recognition systems and acoustic feature mismatches in ASR.

Awards: Recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship supporting innovative research in linguistics and phonetics.

Labs & Affiliations: Active in the Phonetics Lab and Language & Brain Lab, collaborating on projects at the intersection of speech processing and cognitive science.