Yiya Chen

Prof. Yiya Chen is a Professor of Phonetics at Leiden University's Humanities Centre for Linguistics. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of speech melody and pitch variation, particularly in tonal languages like Chinese. She explores cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying speech communication, with expertise in prosody perception and multilingualism. Her work combines acoustic analyses, behavioral experiments, and neurophysiological methods (e.g., EEG).

She holds a PhD from Stony Brook University and has held academic positions at the University of Edinburgh and Radboud University. She has supervised numerous PhD candidates and led major grants, including a Vici grant from NWO. Key projects include studying tone sandhi in Chinese dialects and neural encoding of prosodic variation.

• Education: PhD in Linguistics (Stony Brook University, 2003), MA (Stony Brook University), BA (Beijing Foreign Studies University)
• Grants: Vici (2019), ERC Starting Grant (2008–2014), VIDI (2008–2013)

Her research interests span experimental phonetics, descriptive linguistics, and the interaction between tone and focus in speech.