I am a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University. I work with Morgan Sonderegger and Meghan Clayards on two research projects: “Explaining sound change through mapping the distribution of phonetic biases and automatic speech analysis” (Morgan) and “Towards a robust model of individual differences in context effects in speech perception” (Meghan).

My research investigates how categorical linguistic structure is learned from gradient acoustic input. I focus on the interaction between segmental realization and prosodic structure, and on how learners infer this interdependency from the speech signal. My work integrates phonological theory, speech perception, and quantitative modeling.

My name is pronounced 이승석 [i.sɨŋ.sɔk], but I also go by Josh (since 2007).
(If you’re curious why it’s /i/, not /li/, you can read this Wikipedia page.)

Research Interests

• Phonetics-prosody interface
• Corpus phonetics
• Computational phonology
• Categorical perception
• Phonological learning

Recent Highlights

• Feb 09 2026: I became Theo Tae-Oh Lee’s dad. Welcome to the world, Theo! I love you.
• Sep 2025: I moved to Montréal to work with Morgan Sonderegger and Meghan Clayards at McGill University. I will be at McGill until Jul 2027.
• Sep 2025: I graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst. My dissertation is titled Simultaneous encoding and decoding of laryngeal contrasts and prosodic structure in Seoul Korean, supervised by Kristine Yu, John Kingston, and Mara Breen.