Khang Đinh eating cơm tấm.

Khang

Đinh

[kxaŋ]

[ɗɪŋ̆]

PhD Student, UCLA Department of Linguistics

The spoken voice functions as a performance that transfers symbolic cues, experience, and identity as sound across time. By this reasoning, I am radically curious about how the features of speech can be systematically yet multivocally represented. As an avenue, I am intrigued by adaptations that arise from parallel structures in music and language. Central to my work is the notion of how different language modalities can cast light on grammatical resourcefulness.

I got my BA from UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2025. At UCSB, I worked on various projects with topics in typological speech rhythm, Vietnamese demonstratives, lexical tone:song melody interaction, and politicians' language on social media. Feel free to message me if you would like to discuss any ideas!

Việt Tones ~ Việt Tunes

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I analyzed the phonological and phonetic relationship between the lexical tones of lyrics and their corresponding melodies across 45 Vietnamese pop songs.

V-pop tonal category formation

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An expansion of the Việt Tones ~ Việt Tunes thesis with (1) statistics demonstrating that tone-tune interaction type is predictable from lexical tone, and (2) acoustic data showing how phonetic cues besides pitch are present in Vietnamese tone.

Malay pop syllabification (expanded)

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An expansion of the Malay pop song project with Jian-Leat Siah outlining various musicolinguistic parameterizations that arise in Malay vocoids such as congruent musical note assignment, syllable size duration matching, and gliding with respect to syllable size threshold.

Syllabification in Malay pop

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In collaboration with Jian-Leat Siah, this project investigates glides in Malay pop song lyrics as evidence that complex onsets do indeed appear in Malay syllables (contrary to previous analyses).

English | Tiếng Việt