Cerys Hughes

/kɛɹɪs hjuz/




I'm a current 4th year PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I'm interested in the mechanisms by which speech perception and learning influence phonological typology. I use computational methods to implement hypotheses so that they can be tested against experimental data from human participants. I also probe the behavior of computational models, such as neural networks, so we can better understand their predictions.

Projects and Publications

Probing Neural Network Models of Speech Perception and Sound Change

Testing for Incomplete Neutralization in Tone Contours

Collaborators: Kristine Yu, Alessa Farinella , Seung Suk Lee

Learning Stress Systems Under Differnet Representations

Collaborators: Joe Pater, Alessa Farinella, Seung Suk Lee

Teaching Materials

Mixture of Gaussians in Phonetics and Sound Change lesson for UMass LING492b (Slides ).

Introduction to neural networks (Python notebook1 ,notebook2). Created for a class of students (UMass LING592B) that had linear algebra and some coding background but were new to neural networks. Warning! There is an intentional mistake in the presentation of the Perceptron Update Rule formula in notebook1. Can you find it? :)