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Chilin Shih

Profile picture for Chilin Shih

Contact Information

East Asian Languages and Cultures
2090A Foreign Language Building
707 South Mathews
Urbana, Illinois 61801

Professor Emerita

Research Interests

Phonetics, Phonology, Tone, Intonation, Tone sandhi, Prosody modeling, Second Language Fluency, Pronunciation training, Chinese proficiency testing

Research Description

Dr. Chilin Shih is a Chinese linguist in phonology, phonetics and speech. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature: It is situated in the intersection of linguistics, speech technologies and language teaching. She has worked for ten years on multilingual text-to-speech systems at Bell Laboratories before joining UIUC, and has continued the linguistic work analyzing multilingual prosodic systems and building models to predict prosody from text, including intonation models and duration models.  She has applied speech technologies in language teaching and has built a tone training and testing system Prosody Tutor under an NSF grant. The Prosody Tutor uses an adaptive approach to prosody tutoring and adjusts teaching materials automatically according to students' previous responses. Dr. Shih had another NSF grant working on second language fluency evaluation. The project is based on data collected from the creative output paradigm that she implemented in the third year and fourth year Chinese language classes at UIUC, where the curriculum centers around public speaking training exercises such as debates, interviews, and speeches.

Education

Ph.D. in Linguistics. University of California--San Diego (1986)

Grants

An Interdisciplinary Study of the Dynamics of Second Language Fluency, NSF, 2007-2010
Translating Prosody in an English/Chinese Language Tutoring System, NSF, 2006-2009
Multi-media Interlanguage speech corpus for intelligent Chinese pronunciation training, Innovation Center for Language Resources, China. 2017-2020
The Improvement of Elicited Imitation for Chinese Proficiency Testing, 2017

Awards and Honors

Helen Corely Petit Scholar
Focal Point
Campus Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Instruction Using Educational Technologies
Arnold O. Beckman Research Award

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor Emerita, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Professor Emerita, Linguistics

Honors & Awards

Helen Corely Petit Scholar
Focal Point
Campus Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Instruction Using Educational Technologies
Arnold O. Beckman Research Award

Recent Publications

Yan, X., Lei, Y., & Shih, C. (2023). Are Textbooks Authentic From a Developmental Perspective? A Corpus Analysis of Word Use in Chinese Textbooks in US Universities. Applied Linguistics, Article amad073. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amad073

Gent, H., Adams, C., Shih, C., & Tang, Y. (2022). Deep Learning for Acoustic Irony Classification in Spontaneous Speech. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, 2022-September, 3993-3997. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10978

Le, G., Shih, C., & Tang, Y. (2022). A Laryngographic Study on the Voice Quality of Northern Vietnamese Tones under the Lombard Effect. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, 2022-September, 5278-5282. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10970

Sun, Y., & Shih, C. (2021). Boundary-conditioned anticipatory tonal coarticulation in Standard Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics, 84, Article 101018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2020.101018

Yan, X., Lei, Y., & Shih, C. (2020). A corpus-driven, curriculum-based Chinese elicited imitation test in US universities. Foreign Language Annals, 53(4), 704-732. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12492

View all publications on Illinois Experts