麻豆传媒

My name is Cong [tsʰʊŋ] Zhang [tʃɑŋ] (张聪). I am a Lecturer of Phonetics and Phonology at Speech and Language Sciences, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.

I am in charge of Undergraduate Admission for Speech and Language Sciences, and I am also the Academic Lead for Student Employability and Enterprise for our school.

I am a speech scientist (or phonetician/laboratory phonologist) specialising in speech prosody, with experience in speech technology and clinical speech research.

I study speech prosody from both phonetic and phonological perspectives, using a range of approaches including computational and psycholinguistic methods. My research focuses on word- and sentence-level prosodic interactions, including tone-intonation interaction and boundary-related intonational phenomena across languages. I place particular emphasis on under-documented languages and regional accents. 

Increasingly, I work at the interface of speech science, AI and Healthcare, exploring how prosodic and other phonetic features can support automatic classifications in real-world applications.

I previously worked in speech technology (text-to-speech), where I led an AI singing project, managed speech data collection and annotation, and provided linguistic and phonological input to TTS algorithms and evaluation pipelines. 

Across academia and industry, I am particularly interested in bridging theory, data, and application, and in shaping research directions that make speech science usable beyond the lab.

Education:

• DPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology | University of Oxford, UK
• M.A.(distinction) in Linguistics & Language acquisition | 麻豆传媒 Univeristy, UK
• B.A. (with Excellent Graduate Award) in English Language and Literature (Translation and Interpreting) | Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

Employment:

• Postdoctoral Associate, ERC-funded Project SPRINT [Speech Prosody in Interaction: The form and function of intonation in human communication] | University of Kent, UK & Radboud University, Netherlands
• Linguistics Engineer/Linguist, A-Lab, Rokid Inc.

Please visit my personal website () for more up-to-date information.

If you're interested in doing a PhD with me, please find information here:

I welcome applications in topics on

• speech prosody (e.g. tone, intonation, etc.)
• speech technology and its evaluation (e.g. TTS/ASR and improving them for a certain population, etc.)
• speech from people with various health conditions (e.g. speech from people with aphasia/COPD/Parkinsons, etc.)
• speech and AI (e.g. detection, classification, therapy, etc.)
• speech research methodologies (e.g. remote data collection, open research, alignment tool development)

My main projects can be found here:

Below is a project that received media coverage in BBC, Mirror, Chronicle:

Current teaching:

Undergraduate Teaching

• SPE1051: Research Methods in Practice I
• SPE1059: Phonetics and Phonology I: Fundamentals
• SPE2056: Phonetics and Phonology II: Advanced
• DEN1101: Anatomy of Head and Neck

Postgraduate Teaching

• SPE8151: MSc Phonetics and Phonology I: Fundamentals
• SPE8210: MSc Phonetics and Phonology II: Advanced

Past teaching:

Undergraduate Teaching

• SPE1053: Linguistics and Phonetics I
• SPE2052: Linguistics and Phonetics II

Postgraduate Teaching

• SPE8151: Phonetics I: Speaker, Speech and Language 
• SPE8210: Phonetics II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody

• Articles

  • Zhao T, Zhang C. . Journal of Connected Speech 2026, 1(3), 378-389.
  • Jones S, Kim Y, Zhang C. . Language and Speech 2026, Epub ahead of print.
  • Li Y, Hoogland D, Duncan D, Zhang C. . Linguistics Vanguard 2026. In Press.
  • Zhang C, Jepson K, Chuang Y. . Laboratory Phonology 2024, 15(1), 10492.
  • Kim Y, Kogan VV, Zhang C. . Applied Linguistics 2024, 45(1), 198–205.
  • Xu C, Zhang C. . The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2024, 156(4), 2538–2565.
  • Coretta S, et al, Zhang C, Alotaibi NE, Halfacre C, Kelly NE, Turnbull R, McConnellogue C-AM. . Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 2023, 6(3), 1–29.
  • Zeng B, Williams EM, Owen C, Zhang C, Davies SK, Evans K, Preudhomme S. . Frontiers in Psychology 2023, 14, 1167902.
  • Sun Y, Zhang C. . DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüıstica Teórica e Aplicada 2022, 38(3), 1-32.
  • Zhu J, Tian Z, Liu Y, Zhang C, Lo C. . Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2022, 1134-1154.
  • Zhang C, Jepson K, Lohfink G, Arvaniti A. . The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2021, 149(6), 3910-3916.
  • Wright C, Zhang C. Examining the Effects of Study Abroad on Mandarin Chinese Language Development among UK University Learners. 麻豆传媒 and Northumbria Working Papers in Linguistics 2014, 20.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Zhang C. . In: 6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE 2025). 2025, Palma: Institut de Recerca i Innovació Educativa (IRIE).
  • Jones S, Kim Y, Zhang C. . In: The 29th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference. 2024, Legon, Accra: University of Konstanz.
  • Zhang C, Li T, DeDe G, Salis C. . In: Interspeech 2024. 2024, Kos Island, Greece.
  • Zhang C, Lai C, Napoleao de Souza R, Turk A, Boegel T. . In: Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2023. 2023, Prague, Czech Republic: Guarant International.
  • Gryllia S, Arvaniti A, Zhang C, Marcoux KP. . In: Speech Prosody 2022. 2022, Lisbon, Portugal: ISCA - International Speech Communication Association.
  • Zhu J, Zhang C, Jurgens D. . In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). 2022, Singapore: IEEE.
  • Arvaniti A, Gryllia S, Zhang C, Marcoux KP. . In: Speech Prosody 2022. 2022, Lisbon, Portugal: ISCA - International Speech Communication Association.
  • Zhu J, Zhang C, Jurgens D. . In: Interspeech 2022. 2022, Incheon, Korea: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
  • Zhang C, Zhu J. . In: Interspeech 2021. 2021, Brno, Czechia.
  • Zhang C, Wang X. Segment Duration and Proportion in Mandarin Singing. In: Speech Prosody 2020. 2020.
  • Zhang C. Stacking and Unstacking Prosodies: The Production and Perception of Sentence Prosody in a Tonal Language. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 2019.
  • Zhang C. Chanted Call Tune in Tianjin Mandarin: Disyllabic Calls. In: Speech Prosody 2018. 2018.
  • Wright C, Zhang C. The Effect of Study Abroad Experience on L2 Mandarin Disfluency in Different Types of Tasks. In: The 7th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech. 2015.