About
I am a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California, advised by Louis Goldstein and Shri Narayanan. I am also a trainee in the Hearing and Communication Neuroscience program. My research interests are primarily in experimental phonetics, computational speech science, and speech neuroscience. I am a member of the SAIL and SPAN groups.
Before coming to USC, I completed my MA in Linguistics at UNC-Chapel Hill under the advising of Elliott Moreton and Jeff Mielke. Before that I was a lecturer at Shanghai International Studies University.
Publications
Foley, S., Lee, J., Huang, K., Shi, X., Lee, Y., Goldstein, L., Narayanan, S. (2025). A long-form single-speaker real-time MRI speech dataset and benchmark. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.14479. pdf
Foley, S., Nguyen, H., Lee, J., Kadiri, S. R., Byrd, D., Goldstein, L., Narayanan, S. (2025). Towards disentangling the contributions of articulation and acoustics in multimodal phoneme recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.24059. pdf
Lee, J., Foley, S., Lertpetchpun, T., Huang, K., Lee, Y., Feng, T., Goldstein, L., Byrd, D., Narayanan, S. (2025). ARTI-6: Towards Six-dimensional Articulatory Speech Encoding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21447. pdf
Park, J., Nguyen, H., Foley, S., Lee, J., Lee, Y., Byrd, D., Narayanan, S. (2025). Interpretable Modeling of Articulatory Temporal Dynamics from real-time MRI for Phoneme Recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15689. pdf
Huang, K., Foley, S., Lee, J., Lee, Y., Byrd, D., Narayanan, S. (2025). On the Relationship between Accent Strength and Articulatory Features. Interspeech 2025. (Best student paper award). pdf
Nguyen, H., Foley, S., Huang, K., Shi, X., Feng, T., Narayanan, S. (2025). Speech2rtMRI: Speech-Guided Diffusion Model for Real-time MRI Video of the Vocal Tract during Speech. ICASSP 2025. pdf
Foley, S., Shao, B., and Faytak, M. (2024). Relating frication to articulation in Standard Mandarin apical vowels. Proceedings of the 13th International Seminar on Speech Production. pdf
Foley, S. (2023). The coarticulatory behavior of Standard Mandarin apical vowels. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. pdf
Foley, S. (2022). The acoustics of apical vowels in two endangered Ngwi languages. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. pdf
Manuscripts
Foley, S.. (2024). Probing articulatory representation learning for phonological distinctions. MA Thesis, USC. pdf
Foley, S. (2022). Control and biomechanics in coarticulation: insights from an ultrasound study of Standard Mandarin apical vowels. MA Thesis, UNC-Chapel Hill. link
Presentations
Foley, S. & L. Goldstein. (2025). Probing articulatory representation learning for phonological distinctions. Poster presented at Cog Sci 2025. pdf
Foley, S. & S. Narayanan. (2024). Towards large-scale cross-speaker articulatory modeling of vowels. 187th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. November 18-22 (Virtual).
Foley, S., Shao, B., & Faytak, M. (2024). Relating frication to articulation in Standard Mandarin apical vowels. Poster presented at the 13th International Seminar on Speech Production. pdf
Foley, S.. (2023). The coarticulatory behavior of Standard Mandarin apical vowels. Paper presented at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
Foley, S. & D. Elliott (2022). Revisiting Central Ngwi Tones: a computational approach. Poster presented at The Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Washington, D.C. Jan. 6-9. pdf
Foley, S. (2021). The acoustics of apical vowels in two endangered Ngwi languages. Paper presented at The 57th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. May 6-8 (Virtual).
Foley, S. (2020). Naruo: an endangered Ngwi language spoken in southwestern China. Paper presented at The 53rd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. Denton, TX (Virtual), Oct. 2-3. pdf