Yi-Fang Cheng

Hi there! Welcome to my personal webpage.

I'm a fourth-year Ph.D. student with a graduate certificate in Applied Statistics at Purdue University's Lingusitics Department, where I also earned my MA in Linguistics. I work with Prof. Daniel J. Olson in Purdue Bilingualism Lab (PBL) on Bilingualism and Phonetics. My primary research line focuses on the temporal dynamics of cross-linguistic interference.

Because bilinguals manage multiple languages within a single cognitive system, these are some of the questions I’m trying to answer using both lab-based experimental designs and computational approaches on neural network models:

• How do bilingual speakers' languages interact with each other?
• How do bilingual speakers’ acoustic patterns shift as they switch between languages (code-switch)?
• How can these moment-to-moment acoustic changes be measured and modeled to reveal the underlying processes that guide bilingual speech production?

I also work with Prof. Elsayed Issa in Computational Linguistic @ Purdue (CLAP) on Human–AI interaction. Our work on AI in language learning is supported by the NSF National I-Corps program.

I received my Bachelor's degrees in both Music and English from National Taiwan Normal University. I worked previously as a pianist before joining Purdue. You can find me as a pianist here. And some past recordings here and here.

When I’m not linguisting, I’m probably off befriending animals or watching Wombat-TV;)

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