Baichen Du

See my CV for more details.

Hi! My name is Baichen Du 杜柏辰 [tʷuː4 pai3 ʈʂʰən2] in Mandarin, or [tou2 pak3 sɐn21] in Cantonese. I am graduating from BSocSc in Linguistics and PPA (Politics and Public Administration) at University of Hong Kong in May 2024 and will be on my gap year before joining UCLA Linguistics as a PhD student in Fall 2025. I was also a visiting student at UC Berkeley in the Spring and Fall semester of 2023. I am interested in experimental phonology and phonetics broadly, and speech perception/production, cues weighting and integration, sound change and variation in specific.

Previously, I worked on a number of projects with Prof. Keith Johnson and Dr. Alexandra Pfiffner at UC Berkeley Linguistics, and Dr. Jonathan Havenhill at HKU, as well as Prof. Yao Yao at HKPolyU Chinese and Bilingual Studies. For my political science major, Dr. Haohan Chen supervised me on my UG thesis.

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A. (To be submitted). Cross-modality cue integration and weighting: Lip rounding and acoustic cues in the Mandarin sibilant merger.

• Du, B., Pfiffner, A., Johnson, K. (To appear). 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).

• Du, B. (To appear). An audio-visual account for synchronic sound changes towards sibilants merger in Taiwan Mandarin. In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium 2023, University of California, Berkeley, CA.

• Do, Y., Van Hoey, T., Yu, X., Du, B., Tan, L. (To appear). Tracking phonological regularities: Exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning. Linguistics Vanguard.

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 Unpublished undergraduate thesis of political psychology.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

• 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, 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). An audio-visual account for synchronic sound changes towards sibilants merger in Taiwan Mandarin. Talk given at Seventh Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium 2023, University of California, Berkeley, CA.

• Du, B. (2023). The backfire effect in the perception and judgement of congruent and incongruent interpretation of political propaganda: A pre-analysis plan. Poster presentation at Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program Poster Session: Student Research Posters, University of Hong Kong, HK.