Ke Lin

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. I work with Dr. Ann Bradlow and Dr. Matt Goldrick to develop novel bilingual phonetic corpora, conduct perceptual experiments, and apply machine-learning techniques to better understand speech variation and intelligibility across languages. Current NSF-funded projects include:

• LangDiv: Talker-specific, language-specific, and language-general characteristics of first-language and second-language speech — developing a multilingual, publicly available speech corpus (“Hub-and-Spoke Corpus”) to investigate how talker traits, language structure, and bilingual mode jointly shape speech production and perception.

• Enhancing research on speech and deep learning through holistic acoustic analysis — advancing unsupervised deep-learning methods for discovering representational spaces of speech, integrating computational and phonetic analyses to model human and machine speech processing.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics Georgetown University in October 2025, where I investigated how perceived talker nativeness shapes Mandarin–English and Russian–English bilinguals’ implicit and explicit perceptual adjustments to VOT boundaries. This dissertation is advised by Elizabeth Zsiga, Lourdes Ortega, Lacey Wade, and Sarah Phillips.

Before coming to Georgetown, I earned an MA in Slavic Linguistics at The Ohio State University, where I also indepedently taught Russian language courses for two years. My master’s thesis investigated the social perceptions of non-native accents in Russian.

Broadly, my research centers on the field of sociophonetics. As a sociophonetician, I explore the intricate relationship between social cues and their impact on both speech perception and production. I am also interested in the phenomenon of speech convergence, the process through which speakers align their speech patterns at various phonetic levels.

Here are some of my other ongoing research projects/interests, varying in scope and development. I welcome proposals for collaboration or discussions on these topics:

• Socially modulated perception & production among/by L2 speakers;
• Accessible & affordable eye-tracking methods;
• Individual (cognitive) differences in bilingual speech processing
• Semantic clusters and distributions of Russian prepositions