Linguistics Research

(Under construction — arguably for the rest of his life)

About

As of 2026, Hassan Khan is starting a Master's in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He did his undergrad there as well, and also spent a semester at the University of Amsterdam. His interests as an undergraduate were expansive, but at the moment, he is particularly interested in phonology... and he will elaborate more later.

If he had to list a few topics of particular interest to him right now, he would probably point to cognitive linguistics (lowercase!), phonology and particularly signed language phonology, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language and of science.

Questions like What does silent gesture tell us about linguistic fundamentals?, Why is iconicity so integral to language?, and Why has Hassan switched to third person for this page of his website in particular? are bugging him right now.

Presentations

  1. Khan, Hassan, Yoonjung Kang & Dave Kush. Forthcoming. Graded gender perceptions in personal names predict difficulty in reference resolution. CogSci 2026.
  2. Khan, Hassan, Yoonjung Kang & Dave Kush. Forthcoming. Gender perception varies with consonant sonority in Urdu nonce names. LabPhon 20.
  3. Champagne, Irys-Amélie, Hassan Khan & Blair C. Armstrong. Forthcoming. Vowel classification in nonwords: A comparison of automated, crowdsourced, and expert responses. Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science [CSBBCS] 2026.
  4. Khan, Hassan. 2025. Why you should be interested in phonology. Confluence 2025, University of Toronto. [Abstract (PDF)] [Slides (PDF)]
  5. Khan, Hassan & Yoonjung Kang. 2024. Testing the interaction of gendered sound symbolism and morphology in Urdu names. 10th Annual Scarborough Undergraduate Linguistics Conference. [Abstract (PDF)] [Slides (PDF)]
  6. Khan, Hassan & Yoonjung Kang. 2024. Sound-gender associations in Urdu names. Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference 17. Poster presentation. [Abstract (PDF)] [Poster (PDF)]
  7. Khan, Hassan & Yoonjung Kang. 2024. Gendered sound symbolism in Urdu names interacts with gender morphology. Western Interdisciplinary Student Symposium on Language Research [WISSLR] 16. [Abstract (PDF)] [Slides (PDF)]