new faculty
New Linguistics faculty Sara Ng explores issues in computational models of prosody and speech perception
Dr. Sara Ng is joining the Department of Linguistics as an Assistant Professor during Fall 2025. Ng will be teaching Computational Text Analysis, a course that introduces the basics of text analysis through Python programming. Core concepts include data capture and manipulation, data cleaning and preprocessing, database management, big data, natural language processing, introductory machine learning and text classification.
Ng recently served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Western Washington University. In 2024, she completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her dissertation is titled Prosody in Human Communication and Machine Understanding.
Ng鈥檚 research focuses on issues in computational models of prosody and speech perception. Her primary research concerns how computational methods can be used to better understand the role of prosody in spoken language. Says Ng, 鈥淚 am interested in how humans use tune, rhythm, and pronunciation to convey pragmatic meaning such as discourse structure and conceptual pacts, and how this exchange of information is affected by hearing impairment and other speech disorders.鈥�
Her recent work also concerns how large commercial speech recognition systems such as OpenAI鈥檚 Whisper leverage prosody. Ng uses corpus-based theory-agnostic engineering approaches with grounding in attested generalities of language acoustics. To access data related to recent projects, please refer to Ng鈥檚 .