Jiurui Guo

Oxford-St Cross H.A. Plumer Scholarship in Humanities 

Joining us from: China

DPhil in Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics (2025)

I am originally from Shijiazhuang, a northern Chinese industrial city famous for its pharmaceuticals and rock bands. Before landing at Oxford, I read Linguistics and Applied Statistics at the University of Virginia, USA (BA), and completed an M.Sc. in Statistics at the National University of Singapore. 

My research sits in the emerging field of multimodal communication, investigating how bodily movements and prosody (intonation, stress, loudness, rhythm, etc.) constitute an inseparable part of human communication and achieve meaning-making alongside semantic information, with implications for language education, discourse analysis, and more natural human–computer interaction. 

My project explores the alignment of prosody and co-speech gesture, and how this alignment varies across speakers with different linguistic backgrounds and proficiency levels. Since starting at Oxford, I have been building an annotation and analysis workflow for time-aligned gesticulation data, identifying and filtering linguistic and gestural features for the study, and piloting on a small corpus of multimodal data. 

Alongside multimodal communication, I am interested in laboratory phonetics and phonology, language documentation and revitalisation, and English in aviation. I also forage into Large Language Models (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Outside of research, I enjoy photography, aircraft spotting, music, and ancient languages. I also play drums for my band based here in Oxford. 

St Cross has been a true delight: it is remarkably easy to meet and make genuine connections with very talented people across disciplines and interests. The community, and its marvellous catering team, make everyday life as welcoming as it could possibly be. 

I am very grateful for the generous support of the Clarendon Scholarship and H. A. Plumer Scholarship. Their support is fundamental for the pursuit of my academic interest: it eliminated any financial concerns, gave me the confidence and freedom to focus fully on the questions I care about the most.