Suyuan Liu
Research Area
Education
B.A. in Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 2019
About
I’m a PhD candidate at the Linguistics Department at the University of British Columbia. My dissertation looks into the contribution of voice similarity and perceived standardness in speech processing. Do we, as listeners, have an easier time processing speech that is (1) perceived as more standard and (2) in a voice similar to our own? How do we define standardness and similarity?
My supervisor is Molly Babel. My committee members are Márton Sóskuthy, Jian Zhu and Alexis Black.
Publications
Journal articles:
Liu, S., Sóskuthy, M., & Zhang, S. (2026). Best practices in evaluating forced-alignment accuracy: The case of Mandarin varieties. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 159(4), 3164. [doi]
Faytak, M., Liu, S., & Sundara, M. (2020). Nasal coda neutralization in Shanghai Mandarin: Articulatory and perceptual evidence. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 11(1), 23. [doi]
Conference proceedings:
Liu, S., & Babel, M. (2026, to appear). Introducing MELI: The Mandarin–English Language Interview Corpus. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2026). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). [preprint]
Liu, S., Babel, M., Zhu, J. (2024) A comparison of voice similarity through acoustics, human perception and deep neural network (DNN) speaker verification systems. Proc. Interspeech 2024, 3674-3678. [pdf]
Liu, S. & Babel, M., (2023) Production and perception of Mandarin /i/-nasal rhymes. In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 142–146). Guarant International. [pdf]
Cardoso, A., Liu, S., Pritchard, R., Babel, M.(2023). Simultaneous vowel changes in British Columbian English. In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3006–3010). Guarant International. [pdf]
Awards
2025 Excellence in Graduate Teaching Assistantship Award, Department of Linguistics, UBC
2025 Graduate Student Training Fund, Language Sciences, UBC
2024 Pei-Huang Tung and Tan-Wen Tung Graduate Fellowship
2023 IPA Student Award, International Phonetic Association
2023 Dean of Arts Graduate Student Research Award, UBC