Chenzi Xu is the principal investigator of the project ‘The rise and fall of a tone’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and the John Fell Fund. This multidisciplinary project addresses critical missing links in the theory of tone emergence and loss with cross-linguistic perspectives of tone languages.

Her research interests are in phonetics, psychoacoustics, neurolinguistics, and sociophonetics, with a particular focus on tone languages. Her work often uses computational and experimental approaches, bridging phonetic research with speech and language technologies. Her recent work investigates the production and perception of tonal patterns across languages, with a perspective to understanding systematic phonetic variation and its implications for linguistic theory. For more information, please visit her personal website at https://chenzixu.rbind.io/.