Biography
I was originally born in Minas Gerais, Brazil and completed my undergraduate in Linguistics/Letters at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. There, I was awarded two undergraduate scholarships from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil. In 2012, I have received a MEXT Scholarship from the Japanese government to pursue graduate studies in Japan. I completed my MA in Linguistics at the University of Tokyo in 2015. There, I worked as a teaching assistant for English and Natural Language Processing courses.
I joined UIUC in the Fall of 2015, and I am currently working on my PhD dissertation. To complete my dissertation, I have received a Japanese Studies Fellowship from the Japan Foundation and will be affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems of the University of Tokyo during the 2021-2022 academic year. In UIUC, I have worked as a teaching assistant for Japanese, Portuguese, and Linguistics courses. I have served as co-president of the Linguistics Students Organization (LSO) and I am also an avid language learner. My native language is Portuguese and besides having native-like proficiency in English and Japanese, I know some German, Spanish and Korean.
Besides doing research, teaching, and learning new languages, I like cycling, K-dramas, mangas, anime, and Final Fantasy.
Research Interests
Phonetics/Phonology, Computational Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition
Research Description
The nature of my research is interdisciplinary, and my interests lie within the acquisition of speech sounds by non-native speakers (L2 learners), and sound variation and change. The overarching focus of my research is the mental representation of speech sounds by native speakers and L2 leaners, topics which I explore with experimental and neural network modeling. Most of my recent research is concerned with Japanese, and I have also worked with Brazilian Portuguese and English.
Education
2018 - M.A. in Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2015 - M.A. in Linguistics, University of Tokyo.
2012 - B.A. in Letters (Linguistics), Federal University of Minas Gerais
Grants
2021-2022: Japanese Studies Fellowship, Japan Foundation.
2012-2015: MEXT scholarship, Japanese government.
Awards and Honors
2017 - Student Leadership Award, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
2017 - Best Japanese Language Teaching Assistant, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Courses Taught
Portuguese 401: Intensive Intermediate Portuguese
Japanese 201: Elementary Japanese I
Japanese 202: Elementary Japanese II
Linguistics 400: Intro to Linguistic Structure
Highlighted Publications
Fonseca, Marco. Cantoni, Maria. Cristófaro-Silva, Thaïs (2015). Acoustic and articulatory correlates of Japanese devoiced vowels. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Confererence on Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland.
Cristófaro-Silva, Thaïs. Fonseca, Marco. Cantoni, Maria. (2013). Conflict in patterns of lexical diffusion in diphthong reduction in Brazilian Portuguese. In: The Phonological Society of Japan (org.). Phonological Studies, 16, 3-10. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Cristófaro-Silva, Thaïs. Fonseca, Marco. Cantoni, Maria. (2013). A redução do ditongo [ãw] postônico na morfologia verbaldo português brasileiro: uma abordagem baseada no uso (Unstressed [ãw] diphthong reduction in the verbal morphology of Brazilian Portuguese:a usage-based approach). Letras de Hoje, Porto Alegre, v. 47, n. 3, p. 283-292