LEE, Wai Sum Vanti
Biography
Prof. Wai-Sum Lee is Associate Professor and Phonetics Laboratory Coordinator of the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. Her field of specialization is phonetics and phonology. She has carried out research projects on acoustics, articulation, and perception of the sounds of the Chinese dialects, such as Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, and Hakka. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, including ‘Phonetics’, ‘Experimental Phonetics’, ‘Phonology’, and ‘Phonological Theory’. Prof. Lee has been serving as a member of the Council of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) since 2011 and the Editorial Board for the Journal of the International Phonetic Association since 2008.
Research Interests
- Speech acoustics
- Speech articulation
- Speech perception
- Chinese phonetics and phonology
- Phonetic typology
- Sound change
Key Publications
- Lee, Wai-Sum (2025). Cantonese Phonetics. In A. Chin, S. Kataoka & B.C. Kwok (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Cantonese Linguistics. London, Routledge. (To appear)
- Zhang, Hui, Hongwei Ding & Wai-Sum Lee (2022). The influence of preceding speech and nonspeech contexts on Mandarin tone identification. Journal of Phonetics 93, 101154. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101154
- Lee, Wai-Sum (2016). Articulatory-acoustical relationship in Cantonese vowels. Language and Linguistics 17(4), 477-500. DOI: 10.1177/1606822X16637058
- Lee, Wai-Sum & Eric Zee (2014). Chinese Phonetics. In C.T.J. Huang, Y.H.A. Li & A. Simpson (eds.), The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, Ch. 14, p. 369-399. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118584552.ch14
- Lee, Wai-Sum & Eric Zee (2003). The illustrations of the IPA – Standard Chinese (Beijing). Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33(1), 109-112. DOI: 10.1017/S0025100303001208