Yiya Chen - Biography#

Yiya Chen is Professor of Phonetics at Leiden University and a senior researcher at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.

She received her BA (1992) from Beijing Foreign Studies University (China) and both her MA (1999) and PhD (2003) from Stony Brook University (USA). Her thesis examined the phonetics and phonology of contrastive focus in Mandarin and is one of the pioneering experimental studies on the relationship between linguistic structure and speech communication in a then under-studied language.

She has been a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Radboud University Nijmegen. Before moving to Europe, she visited and taught Chinese at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Phonetics at Cornell University, and Phonology at New York University.

Over the last two decades, Yiya Chen has pursued an innovative and interdisciplinary research program on speech prosody, with support from prestigious grants (including an ERC-Starting grant and the Dutch NWO Talent program VENI, VIDI, and VICI grants). The broad goal of her research is to understand the language sound structures and cognitive mechanisms that underlie speech and speech communication. Her current project aims to investigate the way speakers of typologically different languages employ melodic pitch variations to convey layers of information in speech, signaling not only word-level meanings but also higher-level messages.

Yiya Chen has (co-)authored more than 40 articles in top-tier journals across the fields of language documentation, experimental phonetics, laboratory phonology, and psycho- and neurolinguistics. She has co-edited 4 special volumes and (co-)published a large number of international conference proceeding articles and 7 invited chapters for prestigious handbooks.

She is the supervisor of 10 completed, 6 on-going PhD theses. She has examined 38 PhD theses in and outside of the Netherlands (including, e.g., Oxford University, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Hongkong Polytechnic University). She has served as a steering committee member/co-organizer/co-convenor of a series of workshops/conferences on prosody. Yiya Chen has been on the editorial board of Chinese Journal of Phonetics (since 2020), Journal of Phonetics (since 2012), and Journal of International Phonetic Association (since 2015). She is now also a Senior Editor for Phonetics at the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.