Thank you for looking me up! My departmental web page can be found here. To access data related to recent projects, please refer to my Github page here.
About me
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Western Washington University, a 4-year state university in beautiful Bellingham, Washington near the Canada border. My research focuses on issues in computational models of prosody and speech perception. My primary research concerns how computational methods can be used to better understand the role of prosody in spoken language. I am interested in how humans use tune, rhythm, and pronunciation to convey pragmatic meaning such as discourse structure and conceptual pacts, and how this exchange of information is affected by hearing impairment and speech disorders. My recent work also concerns how large commercial speech recognition systems such as OpenAI's Whisper leverage prosody. I use corpus-based, theory-agnostic, engineering approaches with grounding in attested generalities of language acoustics.
Education
- Ph.D. in Linguistics; University of Washington, 2024
- Advisors: Mari Ostendorf, Richard Wright
- Thesis: Prosody in Human Communication and Machine Understanding
- M.S. in Computational Linguistics; University of Washington, 2023
- B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Honors B.A. in Linguistics; University of Utah, 2017
- Advisor: Abby Kaplan
- Thesis: Musical Text-Setting as Evidence for Syllabification of Highly Moraic Structures in English
- Teaching English to Students of Other Languages (TESOL) Certificate; University of Utah, 2016
My CV can be found here.
My resume can be found here.
Contact: sara.ng (at) wwu.edu