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Our Team

Fenqi Wang

Postdoctoral Fellow

Fenqi Wang earned his MA in Linguistics from the University of Kansas and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Florida. He is now a term lecturer and post-doctoral fellow in Linguistics at Simon Fraser University.

Dr. Wang’s research interests encompass speech production and perception, sound variation, speech emotion recognition, and bilingualism. He is currently employing behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to investigate vocal emotions in American English and Mandarin Chinese, with the ultimate objective of deciphering the intricacies of expression and perception of emotions in speech.

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Xizi Deng

PhD Student

Xizi (Danielle) Deng joined the Department of Linguistics at SFU as a graduate student in 2017 and completed a taught program at Chinese University of Hong Kong before that. Her research interests lie in speech perception, especially the perception of tone and tone sandhi, and also in Theoretical Phonology. Xizi is also working on projects that explore how humans' language ability is correlated with their musical ability. Besides Linguistics, Xizi is also a fan of science fictions and sci-fi movies.

Magdalena Ivok

MA Student

Magdalena Ivok holds a BA in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Glasgow, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Linguistics at SFU. Magda is interested in acoustic phonetics and second language acquisition, and she is writing her MA thesis on the production of English stress levels by English learners. Outside of linguistics, she enjoys spending time with dogs and friends (in that order), and talking to strangers at local coffee shops.

Ivan Fong

MA Student

Ivan graduated as a Diploma in Linguistics student at UBC in 2020. During his study there, he worked as a research assistant at the Speech in Context Lab, mainly for Khia Johnson and Molly Babel. He is mostly interested in investigating the languages that he is the most familiar with (English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean). He is particularly interested in language transfer and his immediate focus is on Cantonese tone merger and syllable fusion. Fun Fact: Before he discovered his love and career in Linguistics, he completed his B.Sc at UBC as a first degree!

Ka Keung (Leon) Lee 

MA Student

Leon joined SFU as a Linguistics Master's student. Before that, he studied and worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Leon is interested in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and multilingualism. More specifically, he wants to learn whether bilingual speakers/ polyglots would perceive and produce sounds and process sentences differently; and how acquiring more than one language would benefit the speakers’ cognitive function. During his ‘me’ time, Leon likes doing sports, playing music, and practicing calligraphy. 

Fact: If something is absolutely to Leon’s taste, it is (very likely to be) obsolete as well.