Background

Eason graduated with first-class honours in English Studies and Translation from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he built a strong foundation in linguistics and sociolinguistics. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a semester at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on speech production, phonology, and the acoustic correlates of phonological contrast.

Previous Research

Before joining Oxford, Eason gained substantial research experience. His undergraduate thesis, "Top or Bottom? A Cross-linguistic Study of Homosexual Cantonese-English Bilingual Males’ Voiceless Sibilant Production", was the first to provide a detailed acoustic analysis of sibilant variation among Cantonese-English bilingual speakers. By examining duration, centre of gravity (CoG), and spectral skewness in /s/ production, it explored intersections of bilingualism, sexual identity, and sociophonetic expression, offering novel insights into how linguistic features encode identity.

Eason served as a research assistant at both the Faculty of Education and the School of Chinese at HKU. At the Faculty of Education, he worked on a project on language attitudes in teaching English and Chinese as a Lingua Franca. Meanwhile, at the School of Chinese, Eason was responsible for maintaining the Newssary mobile application and the Resources for Interpreting website, both of which serve as instrumental toolkits for professional interpreters and translators. In his role, he curated over 600 bilingual Chinese-English entries from current affairs for these platforms, enhancing their value as resources for language professionals.

Eason also worked as a research assistant at HKU’s Speech, Language and Cognition Laboratory, where he contributed to a project focused on the incidental learning of Thai tones. His responsibilities included developing online versions of tasks and experiments, testing participants, and translating various research materials from English to Chinese. Additionally, at the same laboratory, Eason prepared a manuscript on the effectiveness of high-variability phonetic training (HVPT) and conducted empirical research examining the impact of incidental HVPT on the acquisition of nonnative vowels and lexical tones by adult learners.

Eason completed a fully funded twelve-week research internship at the Child Language and Speech Studies Laboratory at the University of Toronto. Under the supervision of Prof. Elizabeth Johnson, he collaborated with PhD students and postdoctoral researchers on various developmental sociolinguistics projects. These included studies on gendered speech and accents, as well as an investigation into the psychological phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect. Eason’s responsibilities encompassed data analysis, literature reviews, research proposal development, stimuli selection and manipulation, and experimental design.

Current Research

Eason is currently engaged in research on Zhanmi (or Jianmi), a lesser-documented language spoken in eastern Guangdong Province, China. His proposed thesis, “An Acoustical Analysis of Vowels in Yue-Zhanmi (Jianmi): System and Diachrony”, aims to document and analyse the vowel system of Chishi Zhanmi while investigating diachronic changes and the influence of Cantonese linguistic practices and regional language policies. Combining phonetic documentation with sociolinguistic analysis, his work contributes to preserving Zhanmi’s linguistic heritage.

Eason has also completed several specialised papers reflecting his diverse expertise. In experimental phonetics, his paper “Voice Onset Time and Burst Spectrum in Cantonese: An Acoustical Analysis” examines how spectral cues in Cantonese stops and affricates signal aspiration contrasts while interacting with lexical tone F0 variations. In psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, his study “Processing Costs of Morphological (In)consistency in Cantonese-English Verb-Mixing: An Eye-tracking and Self-Paced Reading Study” investigates cognitive processing costs associated with morphological consistency during bilingual verb-mixing.
 

Hobbies

In his free time, Eason is a huge fan of snooker. He also plays the recorder with the Oxford Baroque Players.