Andrew Cheng

My research interests are based in phonetics and sociolinguistics (and their happy lovechild, sociophonetics).

Korean American Sociophonetics and Sociolinguistics

My dissertation project engages the young Korean American speech community and examines sociophonetic variables in their English and Korean. I have looked at their participation in the California Vowel Shift and their base pitch in both languages. Data come from bilingual ethnographic interviews, which provide a deeper understanding of each individual's language backgrounds, attitudes, ideologies, and idiosyncrasies, and also allows for adjacent analyses of topic-based style-shifting, speech accommodation, and more. Post-dissertation, I am collaborating with Steve Cho (CSU Northridge) on a project that analyzes the perception of Korean American voices and how ethnic identification is affected by listener characteristics, which we have submitted for publication.

  • Cheng, A. and Cho, S. Speaker and Listener influences on perception of ethnic identity in speech: Evidence from Korean Americans. Presented at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, California, January 2021.
  • Cheng, A. (2020). 'School' Versus 'Home': California-based Korean Americans' Context-dependent Production of /u/ and /oʊ/. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 26.1, Article 9. [pdf]
  • Cheng, A. (2020). Cross-linguistic f0 differences in bilingual speakers of English and Korean. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147, pp. EL67-EL73. [pdf][doi]
  • Cheng, A. `No' vs. `Aniyo': Back vowel diphthongization in Heritage Korean. Presented at the 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, California, December 2019. [pdf]
  • Cheng, A. (2019). Age of Arrival does not affect childhood immigrants' acquisition of ongoing sound change: Evidence from Korean Americans. In Calhoun et al., (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, pp. 2213-2217. [pdf]
  • Cheng, A. Style-Shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York City, New York, January 2019. [pdf]
  • Cheng, A. Style-Shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Presented at the 2019 Five-Minute Linguist Event, New York City, New York, January 2019. (Runner-up)[video]

Asian Americans and Canadians and Raciolinguistics

Together with a diverse coalition of Asian identified linguists from the United States and Canada, I am working on increasing representation and understanding of people of Asian descent (broadly defined) as uniquely racialized individuals within linguistics as an academic field. My work with Lauretta Cheng (Michigan), Wilkinson Gonzales (Michigan), and Pocholo Umbal (Toronto) is now a manuscript underview at Language and Linguistics Compass.

  • Cheng, A. Why you can't hear my accent: Racial bias and speech perception. Presented at the 5th Annual UCI Postdoctoral Scholar Research Symposium, UC Irvine, March 2021. [video]
  • Cheng, A., Cheng, L., Gonzales, W., and Umbal, P. VariAsian: Contact and Change in Asian North American Speech Communities (with Sheydaei, I., Zheng, M., Namboodiripad, S., and Tse, H.). Organized session at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA, January 2021.
  • Anánd, A., Lee, C., Cheng, A., and Garza, J. Room at the Table: Locating Asian Identity in Linguistics and the LSA. (with L. Hou, N. Mararac, S. Shankar, E. Chun, J. Lee, A. Lo, and A. Reyes). Organized session at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA, January 2021.

Korean Heritage Language and Linguistics

I am the project head of KoHL/콜, the Korean Heritage Language Research Group. KoHL gathers scholars from the field of linguistics and other language-oriented disciplines who are pursuing research on Korean language/linguistics, Korean as a heritage language, and the language practices of peoples and communities of Korean heritage, and we hold bi-weekly roundtable research presentations. In my own work in Korean linguistics, I examine the timecourse of a sound change in Seoul Korean and its advancement in Korean American populations.

  • Cheng, A. The null effect of Korean language education on cross-linguistic variation in heritage bilinguals. To be presented at the International Conference of Korean Linguistics, August 2021.
  • Cheng, A. Heritage Korean and Ethnic Identity in California. Presented at the 20th Meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics, University of Helsinki, June 2017.
  • Cheng, A. (2019). VOT merger and f0 contrast in Heritage Korean in California. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 25.1, Article 9. [pdf]

Transgender Speech

In this project, I approach the scientific analysis of the speech patterns of male-to-female transgender individuals from the purview of individualized identity-formation, rather than a comparative or clinical approach. I have analyzed the speech of two transgender women and noted the similarities and differences in the ways your vocal characteristics change over the course of seven to ten years. (I am happily looking for trans collaborators (linguists and non-linguists) on this project! Please contact me.)

  • Cheng, A. More than Pitch Perfect: A Longitudinal Acoustic Study of a Male-to-Female Transgender Video Blogger. Presented at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 2018.
  • Cheng, A. A Longitudinal Acoustic Study of Two Transgender Women on YouTube. Submitted to American Speech.

Power and Accommodation

This experimental sociolinguistics project used a role-play paradigm to elicit conversational speech between two interlocutors given a power imbalance in their assigned character roles, in order to test the hypothesis that an individual's sense of personal and interpersonal power influences the amount of phonetic accommodation that they do in casual speech. We have found that the direction of pitch accommodation is influenced by both gender and interpersonal power.

  • Barron-Lutzross, A., Cheng, A., Shen, A., Wilbanks, E., and Mirzaagha, A. Do Personal and Interpersonal Power Influence Phonetic Accommodation? Presented at the Laboratory Phonology 16, Lisbon, Portugal, June 2018. [pdf]

Californian English

As a native Californian, I am curious about the variety of American English that I grew up speaking and how it has been portrayed in popular media as well as in past linguistic literature. In particular, I have been analyzing the vowel spaces of native Californians of Asian, Latino, and other non-White backgrounds in order to find out to what extent they may participate in the regional sound change called the California Vowel Shift.

  • Cheng, A., Faytak, M., and Cychosz, M. (2016). Language, race, and vowel space: Contemporary Californian English. In Clem et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 63-78. [pdf]

Covert Articulation

This articulatory phonology project, in collaboration with Susan Lin and Emily Remirez, uses ultrasound imaging to analyze instances of covert articulation, specifically when tongue tip constriction is articulatorily present, but acoustically absent, during the phenomenon of word-final coronal stop deletion. The data come from casual/naturalistic speech elicited using the Map Task, a form of gameplay used in sociolinguistic studies when focusing on speech as it occurs in realistic contexts.

  • Cheng, A., Remirez, E., and Lin, S. An Ultrasound Investigation of Covert Articulation in Rapid Speech. Presented at the Workshop on Dynamic Modeling in Phonetics and Phonology, Chicago Linguistics Society 23, University of Chicago, May 2017. [pdf]