Francesco Burroni

Hi and welcome to my website.

I am a computational articulatory phonetician working on speech production and its diversity cross-linguistically and across dialects and individuals. I currently work as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter with the Spoken Language Processing Group and the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at LMU Munich, Germany. I also hold a special lecturer affiliation with Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Speech seems effortless and simple, yet it is one of the most complex activities performed by the human central nervous system, requiring the coordination of more than a hundred muscles with millimeter and millisecond precision. I study the principles that make speech production and perception possible, and the tension between their universal, body-grounded character and their language-specific instantiations shaped by culture, history, cognition, and health.

To understand the laws of speech, I draw on state-of-the-art tracking and imaging techniques - such as electroglottography, aerodynamic investigations, electromagnetic articulography, and real-time MRI – combined with statistical (e.g., functional data analysis, bayesian statistics), dynamical-systems and machine learning/AI modeling. I apply these techniques to a typologically diverse range of languages – from Italian and French to Thai, Japanese, Malay, Icelandic, and beyond – and to diverse populations of speakers ranging from typical adults to children and, recently, clinical populations.

The pursuit of knowledge is a collective enterprise and I am always fond of collaborating with other researchers across phonetics, linguistics, psychology, and the cognitive and clinical sciences.

NEWS & UPDATES

  • Jun. 2026 New paper now out in JASA Express Letters on the magnification and changes in information properties of phonetic vowel-to-vowel co-articulation that leads to phonologized metaphony sound change. It is joint work with my great co-authors Pia Greca (first author) and Jonathan Harrington. Link forthcoming.

  • Jun. 2026: Co-authors and I have four upcoming contributions at Labphon20 in Montréal:

    • Voicing as a whole-vocal-tract articulation: Evidence from an MRI study of Quebec French bilabial stops

      [with J. Riverin-Coutlée]

      located at the Articulatory Control Workshop

    • Phonological Length Contrasts as Articulatory “Tasks”

      [with S. Maspong]

      located at the Articulatory Control Workshop

    • Articulatory characteristics of vowel length in Thai: Intrinsic vs extrinsic accounts

      [with S. Maspong (first author) and J. Kirby]

      Talk in the Articulation Session

    • Distributed Articulatory Control underlies Singleton/Geminate Contrasts Production: Evidence from Italian EMA Data across Speaking Rates

      [with S. Maspong, P. Hoole, J. Kirby]

      Poster Session 3

      If you are attending the conference please stop by and see you in Montréal.

  • Jun. 2026: I gave an invited talk at the University of Cologne summarizing several years of research on tone and articulation. Before and after the talk, I had a fantastic time visiting Prof. Simon Rössig’s group and the Phonetics department. I heard all about the very interesting research being conducted there and their EMA and prosody work. Looking forward to my next visit and future interactions.

  • Jun. 2026: New paper on Articulatory Control in Japanese Geminate production now out in Laboratory Phonology. It is joint work with fantastic co-authors Lia Saki Bučar Shigemori, Shigeto Kawahara, and Jason Shaw. You will find it here (currently being copyedited).

  • Jan. 2026: New paper on voicing and gemination effects on f0 in Italian now out in JASA Express Letters. It is joint work with my great co-authors Sireemas Maspong and James Kirby. You can find it here.

  • Jan. 2026: I gave an invited talk at the University of Potsdam. After the talk, I had a fantastic time visiting Prof. Adamantios Gafos’ group. It was the perfect occasion to hear about all the cool research being pursued and exchange ideas . Looking forward to the next visit.