profile picture of Kristine M. Yu

Kristine M. Yu

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Integrative Learning Center N422
Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA

E-mail:  krisyu at linguist dot umass dot edu
CV | GitHub | OSF | Google Scholar | ORCID

Research

I am a linguist and a phonetician and phonologist. My primary focus is on the computation of prosody, from the speech signal to grammar and processing. My work integrates diverse approaches, including fieldwork, experiments, formal language theory, and machine learning. Recent language areas of focus include Bole, Samoan, and African American English.


Team

Current

▶ Alessa Farinella (Ph.D. student) ▶ Seung Suk (Josh) Lee (Ph.D. student) ▶ Charlotte Kaiser (Undergraduate)

Alumni

▶ Leland Reimer (née Kusmer) (Ph.D. 2020, co-supervised with Kyle Johnson). Software Engineer, Toast ▶ Ivy Hauser (Ph.D. 2019, co-supervised with John Kingston). Assistant Professor, University of Texas Arlington ▶ Valerie Higgins (B.A. 2018). Product Development, Gyan AI ▶ Kate Silverstein (B.A. 2014). Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Mozilla


Publications

To appear

  • Yu, Kristine M. (to appear). "Samoan intonation and challenges for Autosegmental-Metrical theory". In Sun-Ah Jun and Sameer ud Dowla Khan (eds.), Prosodic Typology III. Oxford University Press. Oxford, England.
    pdf bibtex

    • 2024

    • Yu, Kristine M. (2024). "The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology". Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, pages 1–5, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-1.
      pdf web bibtex slides from related talk
    • Yu, Kristine M. and Alessa Farinella (2024). "Prosodic variability in marking remote past in African American English". Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, pages 1065–1069, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-215.
      pdf web bibtex poster
    • Kezerian, William; Wyner, Lam An; Ansari, Sandro and Kristine M. Yu (2024). "Ye Olde French: Effect of Old and Middle French on SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task Data". Proceedings of the 21st SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 39–50, doi: 10.18653/v1/2024.sigmorphon-1.5.
      pdf web GitHub bibtex
    • Lu, Yu-An, & Yu, Kristine M. (2024). "Phonetics of Formosan Languages". In P. J. Li, E. Zeitoun and R. De Busser (eds.), Handbook of Formosan Languages: The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan, 44-93. Brill. Leiden, The Netherlands. doi: 10.1163/2772-5766_HFLO_COM_102010
      pdf web OSF bibtex

    2023

    • Hughes, Cerys, Lee, Seung Suk, Farinella, Alessa and Kristine M. Yu (2023). "Phonetic implementation of phonologically different high tone plateaus in Luganda" In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1985-1989. Guarant International.
      pdf web bibtex slides OSF
    • Stabler, Edward P. and Kristine M. Yu (2023). "Unbounded recursion in two dimensions, where syntax and prosody meet". Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 343–556, doi: 10.7275/d12p-8590.
      pdf web bibtex GitHub slides

    2022

    • Yu, Kristine M. (2022). "Jonathan Barnes and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (eds.) (2022). Prosodic theory and practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. ix + 453". Phonology, 39(2), 377–384. doi:10.1017/S0952675723000052.
      pdf web bibtex reviewed book
    • Armstrong, Meghan, Breen, Mara, Gooden, Shelome, Levon, Erez, & Yu, Kristine M. (2022). "Sociolectal and dialectal variation in prosody". Language and Speech, 65(4), 783-790. doi: 10.1177/00238309221122105.
      pdf web bibtex special issue
    • Green, Lisa, Yu, Kristine M., Neal, Anissa, Whitmal, Ayana, Powe, Tamira, & Özyıldız, Deniz. (2022). "Range in the Use and Realization of BIN in African American English". Language and Speech, 65(4), 958-1006. doi: 10.1177/00238309221111201.
      pdf web bibtex OSF
    • Yu, Kristine M. (2022). "Representing multiple dependencies in prosodic structures". Society for Computation in Linguistics 5(1), 171–183, doi: 10.7275/hj4r-d776.
      pdf web bibtex

    2021

    • Yu, Kristine M. (2021). "Computational Perspectives on Phonological Constituency and Recursion". Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 20, 77–114. doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.354.
      pdf web bibtex
    • Yu, Kristine M. (2021). "Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 39, 291-365. doi: 10.1007/s11049-020-09470-2.
      pdf web bibtex OSF

    2020

    • Kim, Seoyoung, Matachana, Claudia, Nyman, Alex, and Kristine M. Yu. (2020). "Creak in the phonetic space of low tones in Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese, and White Hmong ". Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020, 523-527. doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-107.
      pdf web bibtex

    2019

    • Yu, Kristine M. 2019. "Parsing with Minimalist Grammars and prosodic trees". In Robert C. Berwick and Edward P. Stabler (eds.), Minimalist Parsing, Chapter 4, 69-109, doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198795087.003.0004.
      pdf web bibtex
    • Yu, Kristine M. 2019. "Probing voice quality's contribution to tone perception: challenges for synthesis software". In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 2104-2108). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
      pdf web bibtex

    2018

    • Yu, Kristine M. 2018. "Advantages of constituency: computational perspectives on Samoan word prosody". In Annie Foret, Reinhard Muskens and Sylvain Pogodalla (eds.), Formal Grammar. 22nd International Conference, FG 2017, Toulouse, France, July 22-23, 2017, Revised Selected Papers, 105-124, Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg. doi: 10.1007/978-3-662-56343-4_7.
      pdf web bibtex GitHub

    2017

    • Yu, Kristine M. 2017. "The role of time in phonetic spaces: Temporal resolution in Cantonese tone perception". Journal of Phonetics 65, 126-144. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2017.06.004.
      pdf web bibtex
    • Yu, Kristine M. and Edward P. Stabler. 2017. "(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing". Laboratory Phonology 8(1): 25. doi: 10.5334/labphon.113.
      pdf web bibtex supplementary materials

    2016

    • Yu, Kristine M. and Deniz Özyıldız. 2016. "The absolutive ia particle in Samoan". In E. Clem et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Forty-second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 387-406.
      pdf web bibtex

    2014

    • Yu, Kristine M. 2014. "The experimental state of mind in elicitation: illustrations from tonal fieldwork". Language Documentation & Conservation 8, 738-777, http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24623.
      pdf web bibtex GitHub
    • Zuraw, Kie, Yu, Kristine M. and Robyn Orfitelli. 2014. "The word-level prosody of Samoan". Phonology 31 (2), 271-327, doi: 10.1017/S095267571400013X.
      pdf web bibtex
    • Yu, Kristine M. and Hiu Wai Lam. 2014. "The role of creaky voice in Cantonese tonal perception". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136 (3), 1320-1333, doi: 10.1121/1.4887462.
      pdf web bibtex
  • Yu, Kristine M., Khan, Sameer ud Dowla and Megha Sundara. 2014. "Intonational phonology in Bengali and English infant-directed speech". Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014, 1130-1134, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-216
    pdf web bibtex talk video slides

2012

  • Kuo, Grace C.-H. and Kristine M. Yu. 2012. "Taiwan Mandarin Quantifiers". In Edward L. Keenan and Denis Paperno (eds.) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language, 647-698. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 90. Springer, Dordrecht. doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_12.
    pdf web bibtex

2011

  • Kristine M. Yu. 2011. The sound of ergativity: morphosyntax-prosody mapping in Samoan. In: Suzi Lima, Kevin Mullin, Brian Smith, (eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Vol. 2, Graduate Linguistic Student Association, Amherst, MA, pps. 825-838. (Sometimes cited as Yu (2009)).
    pdf web bibtex
  • Kristine M. Yu. 2011. The learnability of tones from the speech signal. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California.
    pdf web bibtex
  • Shue, Yen-Liang, Keating, Patricia, Vicenik, Chad and Kristine Yu. 2011. "VoiceSauce: a program for voice analysis". In Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII 2011, 1846-1849.
    pdf web bibtex software
  • Yu, Kristine M. and Hiu Wai Lam. 2011. "The role of creaky voice in Cantonese tonal perception". In Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII 2011, 2240-2243.
    pdf web bibtex

2010

  • Kristine M. Yu. 2010. "Laryngealization and features for Chinese tonal recognition". In Proceedings of Interspeech 2010, 1529-1532. doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2010-446.
    pdf web bibtex
  • Kristine M. Yu. 2010. "Representational maps from the speech signal to phonological categories: a case study with lexical tones. In: Thomas Graf, ed., UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, Papers in Mathematical Linguistics 1, Volume 15, Article 5: 1 – 30.
    pdf web bibtex

2009

  • Orfitelli, Robyn and Kristine Yu. 2009. "Intonational Phonology of Samoan". Poster handout presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, May 2, 2009, University of California, Santa Cruz.
    pdf bibtex

Selected talks

  • Yu, Kristine M., Kaiser, Charlotte, Farinella, Alessa, and Seung Suk Lee. 2025. "Cross-linguistic evidence for prosodic domains: are tones "different"?". Exploring Boundaries, March 13 2025, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. Talk presentation.
    slides web bibtex
  • Yu, Kristine M. 2024. "The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology". Speech Prosody 2024, July 5 2024, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands. Keynote Address.
    slides web bibtex related conference paper
  • Farinella, Alessa, Yu, Kristine M., Brugos, Alejna, and Lisa Green. 2021. "Biases from MAE-ToBI intonational transcription conventions in the intonational analysis of African American English". New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49, October 21, 2021, University of Texas at Austin/Virtual. Conference presentation. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.13351372
    slides web bibtex talk video