Hi I am David Dai (with a secret Chinese first name) and I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics. My research interests include speech production and perception, clear speech, and second language speech. Specifically, I am interested in how speakers from different language backgrounds modify their speech to improve intelligibility, as well as how these adaptations affect communication with both human listeners and speech technologies. More broadly, I am also interested in the syntax-semantics interface and computational linguistics.

Outside of the theoretical world, I have also worked as a Chinese-English translator for nearly a decade, translating everything from video games and news to autobiographies and fiction. Consequently, I have spent far too much time thinking about language.

When I am not staring at waveforms, I enjoy reading books I may or may not like, learning languages I have no practical need for, and working out just enough to justify sitting all day.

Mandarin is my native language. I also speak English, some German (enough to not starve in Germany), and I've studied Spanish and Latin. And by “studied,” I do mean studied😉.