Baichen Du

Hello! I am a PhD student at UCLA Linguistics, specializing in Phonetics and Phonology. I study how the structure and fine details of language are produced, perceived, acquired, and changed with various methodologies, such as experimentation, computation, and fieldwork. For example, I study the role of phonology when interacting with perceptibility, articulation, lexical access and variation, and how this role may inform our understanding of grammatical theory. Currently, I am a member of the UCLA Phonetics Lab . My thesis is advised by Megha Sundara and Kie Zuraw (co-chair). I worked on a number of projects with Yao Yao, Keith Johnson, Alexandra Pfiffner, and Jonathan Havenhill. For more details, see my CV.

• Variation in phonological rule application: The role of production planning.
• Sensitivity to tonal information in Mandarin lexical access: Evidence from corpus study, eye tracking, production, and perception
• Articulatory gestures and sound changes in the context of Mandarin Chinese
• Native and non-native speaker's articulation and production of facial gestures

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A. The co-variance of acoustic cues and lip gestures in the production of the Mandarin sibilant contrast. Resubmitted to Journal of Laborotary Phonology.

• Yu, X., Van Hoey, T., Tan, F., Du, B. & Do, Y. (2024). Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning. Linguistics Vanguard. doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0050

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A., Johnson, K. (2024, Jan). The role of visible articulatory variation in Mandarin sibilant contrast and merger. Talk given at 2024 LSA Annual Meeting (LSA2024), New York City, NY.

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A., Johnson, K. (2023, Dec). Consonant and vowel rounding: same acoustics, different visuals. Poster presented at ASA 185th Meeting (ASA185) Sydney, Australia.

• Havenhill, J., Du, B. (2023, Dec). Visual cues in sound change: A cross-modal perceptual account for the typological rarity of labial palatalization. Poster presented at ASA 185th Meeting (ASA185) Sydney, Australia.

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A., Johnson, K. (2023, Oct). Visible articulatory variation as a cue to sound change: Lip rounding and lip protrusion variability in the Mandarin sibilant merger. Talk given at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 51 (NWAV51), Queens College, New York City, NY.

• Du, B. (2023). Acoustic distance effect on the perception of sibilants mergers between retroflexes and alveolars in Taiwan Mandarin. Poster presented at ASA 184th Meeting (ASA184), Chicago, IL.

• Du, B. (2023, Sep). Introduction to Advanced R Programming with RMarkdown. The Sociolinguistics Lab, University of California, Berkeley.

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A., Johnson, K. (2024). Visible articulatory variation as a cue to sound change: Lip rounding and lip protrusion variability in the Mandarin sibilant merger. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 30.2 (Selected Papers from NWAV 51).

• Du, B. (2023). The backfire effect in the perception and judgement of congruent and incongruent interpretation of political propaganda. Unpublished undergraduate thesis in political psychology. University of Hong Kong.

• POLI3148: Data Science in Politics and Public Administration (HKU, 2024 Fall, Dr. Haohan Chen)
See the course archive I compiled for more details here.

My name is spelled as Paak San Dou [pak3 sɐn21 tou2] in Cantonese. Prior to joining UCLA, I worked as a full-time research assistant at the Speech and Language Science lab at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, and at the Psychology Department at University of Manitoba - Winnipeg before completing my study abroad at UC Berkeley. I also enjoy applying data analytics and machine learning techniques to linguistic research.

© 2025 Baichen Du. Manufactured in 2000. 🇭🇰 Exported from Hong Kong.