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Baichen Du

he/him/his
PhD @UCLA Linguistics
baichendu (at) ucla dot edu

About Me

Hello! I am a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at UCLA. I work on phonetics and phonology, as well as their interface with psycholinguistics, drawing on experimental, computational, and fieldwork methods. My research investigates how abstract phonological representations interact with the mechanisms of speech production and perception, and how these interactions contribute to phonological variation and sound change. I am particularly interested in the role of speech planning and processing, as well as articulatory variability and cross-modal cue integration, and their contribution to phonological patterns.

My qualifying paper, advised by Kie Zuraw, Magha Sundara, Jesse Harris, and Jonah Katz, investigates how the retrieval of lexical and phonological representation during speech planning affects variation in external sandhi.

You can find more about my ongoing projects on the Research page page, and my published work and manuscripts on the Publications page. For more details, see my CV.

News

08/26/2026 - Our paper, The co-variance of acoustic cues and lip gestures in the production of the Mandarin sibilant contrast, co-authored with Alexandra Pfiffner, is published in Laboratory Phonology. DOI: doi.org/10.16995/labphon.20289.