My research interests primarily lie in sociolinguistics and phonetics. More specifically, I am interested in how phonetic variation works in tandem with other semiotic resources to index social meaning.
I use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, ranging from experiments to ethnography, to investigate these questions.
Here are some selected papers and presentations:
2024
Tan, Yin Lin, Ting Lin, and Meghan Sumner. Pitch variability cues perceptions of Singlish: A perceptually-guided approach to sociophonetic variation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 30(2). 126–134. [Paper]
Hermosillo, J. Adolfo, Jonathan WuWong, Yin Lin Tan, Irene Yi, and Rhea Kapur. A very subjective but really interesting phenomenon: Intensifier variation and change in Salinas. Talk at New Waves of Analyzing Variation 52 (NWAV 52). Miami, FL, USA. 7–9 Nov. [Slides]
Tan, Yin Lin. Towards an indexical account of English in Singapore: Sociophonetic variation and Singlish. Talk at Berkeley Phonetics, Phonology and Psycholinguistics Forum (Phorum). Berkeley, CA, USA. 25 Oct. [Slides]
Tan, Yin Lin, Ting Lin, and Meghan Sumner. The effect of linguistic experience on the role of prosodic cues in categorizing Singlish. Poster at 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19). Seoul, South Korea. 27–29 Jun. [Poster]
Tan, Yin Lin, Ting Lin, and Meghan Sumner. Identifying the social correlates of Singlish: The relationship between Singlish-ness and locally relevant meanings. Talk at Sociolinguistics Symposium 25 (SS 25). Perth, Australia. 24–27 Jun. [Slides]
Tan, Yin Lin, Ting Lin, Robert J. Podesva, and Meghan Sumner. Pitch variability cues perceptions of Singlish: A perceptually-guided approach to sociophonetic variation. Talk at The 100th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2024). New York City, NY, USA. 4–7 Jan. [Slides]
2023
Aji, Alham Fikri, Jessica Zosa Forde, Alyssa Marie Loo, Lintang Sutawika, Skyler Wang, Genta Indra Winata, Zheng Xin Yong, Ruochen Zhang, A. Seza Doğruöz, Yin Lin Tan, and Jan Christian Blaise Cruz. Current status of NLP in South East Asia with insights from multilingualism and language diversity. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 8–13. [Paper]
Tan, Yin Lin, Ting Lin, and Meghan Sumner. Pitch variability cues perceptions of Singlish: A perceptually-guided approach to sociophonetic variation. Talk at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 51 (NWAV 51). New York City, NY, USA. 13–15 Oct.
Ng, Bee Chin, Yin Lin Tan, and Francesco Cavallaro. Five decades of matched guise studies -- what do we know about contextual constraints?. Talk at International Symposium of Bilingualism 14 (ISB 14). Sydney, Australia. 26–30 Jun. [Slides]
Tan, Yin Lin. Variation in multilingual communities: Rhythm and English-Mandarin code-switching in Singapore. Poster at International Symposium of Bilingualism 14 (ISB 14). Sydney, Australia. 26–30 Jun. [Poster]
Yong, Zheng Xin, Ruochen Zhang, Jessica Forde, Skyler Wang, Arjun Subramonian, Holy Lovenia, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Winata, Lintang Sutawika, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Yin Lin Tan, Long Phan, Rowena Garcia, Thamar Solorio, and Alham Fikri Aji. Prompting large language models to generate code-mixed texts: The case of South East Asian languages. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching. 43–63. [Paper]
2022
Tan, Yin Lin. Rhythmic variation in code-switching between Mandarin, English, and Singlish in Singapore. Talk at New Ways of Analyzing Variation Asia-Pacific 7 (NWAV-AP 7). Bangkok, Thailand. 14–16 Dec. [Slides]