chandan on a bike

Associate Professor
Undergraduate Program Director Linguistics

Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
(416) 736-2100 x33791
chandann@yorku.ca

I am an Associate Professor of Lingusitics in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. I also direct the Speech and Psycholinguistics Lab, where I work on projects with undergrads and graduate students from Linguistics, Psychology, and Cognitive Science.

I'm interested in lots of aspects of speech, but mostly how infants and adults perceive speech, how our perception of speech interacts with our language, and how speech perception and acoustic phonetics contribute to historical sound change.

I started my career working on the problem of how our developing perception of speech acoustics (in infancy) is reflected in larger typological patterns observed in sound systems. I've also worked on how caregivers' speech (in languages like Sri Lankan Tamil and Tagalog) to infants changes as infants develop. Another research program addresses how our perception of speech interacts with our lexicon.

I'm currently starting a new SSHRC-funded proj on lexical access in bilinguals. I'm also working on perceptual and phonological drivers of debuccalization in the history of Kannada (ಪ>ಹ). I've also recently collaborated on a project aimed at understanding the biomechanics and acoustics of Sygyt style of Tuvan throat singing.

I'm Californian (East Bay) and went to Cal Berkeley ('96, Sanskrit) then the Univ. of Michigan ('06, Linguistics). I've always played music.

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Recent work

New Projs

    1. Lexical access in bilinguals of "doppelgänger" languages (like Bengali/Assamese) (SSHRC-funded)
    2. Burst amplitude and consonant confusion in Kannada
    3. Cross-language perception of word-final stops in Vietnamese (with Duy Le)
    4. Toronto Tamil Corpus (TTC) (with Tamil Studies and Digital Humanities at UTSC)

Teaching