About
Dr. Cong Zhang is a Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, where he also serves as the Academic Lead for Student Employability and Enterprise. Previously, he held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC project SPRINT at University of Kent (2019-2020) and Radboud University (2020-2022), and worked as a TTS linguist at Rokid Inc. in Beijing.
Dr. Zhang's educational background includes:
- DPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology from University of Oxford (2018), supervised by Professor Aditi Lahiri
- M.A. with Distinction in Linguistics & Language Acquisition from Newcastle University (2012)
- B.A. in Translation and Interpreting from Beijing Foreign Studies University (2011)
His research primarily focuses on speech prosody, examining intonation, lexical tone, and rhythm across languages. He employs diverse methodologies spanning Phonetics and Phonology (particularly Laboratory Phonology), Psycholinguistics, Computational Linguistics, and Language Acquisition. His work often investigates tonal languages, particularly Mandarin varieties, exploring how sentence-level prosody interacts with word-level prosody. He also maintains research interests in translation and interpreting studies.
His recent publications demonstrate a strong emphasis on methodological rigor in phonetic research, with multiple papers comparing recording methods and analytical approaches. He has made significant contributions to understanding citation tone production across languages, prosody in aphasia, and the application of gamification in linguistic data collection. His work bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications in speech technology and clinical settings, reflecting an interdisciplinary approach that spans computational methods, experimental phonetics, and clinical linguistics.
Dr. Zhang's scientific achievements include:
- Second Prize of Newcastle University's Open Research Awards (2024)
- Funding from ESRC for Festival of Social Sciences event 'Wey aye, man - Think you know a North-East accent when you hear one?' (2024)
Dr. Zhang has been actively involved in knowledge exchange, with his Festival of Social Science event reported by BBC, Mirror, and Chronicle. He has collaborated extensively with researchers across multiple institutions on projects related to speech prosody, including the ERC-funded SPRINT project. His work on remote data collection methods has been particularly timely given the challenges of conducting phonetic research during the pandemic, demonstrating that lossless format phone recordings can be a viable option for certain phonetic studies. His invited talk at HKPU on 'Tonal Tug-of-War: The Interplay of Lexical and Sentence Prosody' further highlights his expertise in this specialized area.
Dr. Zhang is affiliated with the LingLab facilities at Newcastle University and contributes to the Children's Speech and Language Clinic. His previous work with the Language and Brain Lab at Oxford and the ERC SPRINT project demonstrate his engagement with interdisciplinary research teams focused on the cognitive and communicative aspects of speech prosody, establishing him as a significant contributor to contemporary phonetic and phonological research.
