Elizabeth Cook Zsiga (/ˈziːɡə/)[1] (b. 1964) is a linguist whose work focuses on phonology and phonetics. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.
Zsiga completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in 1993 as a student of Louis M. Goldstein, and affiliated with Haskins Laboratories, with a dissertation titled Features, gestures, and the temporal aspects of phonological organization.[2] She has been on the faculty at Georgetown since 1994, as Assistant Professor (1994-1999), Associate Professor (1999-2011), and Professor (since 2011).[3][4]
Zsiga's research interests have been wide-ranging and have been supported by numerous awards and federal grants from the National Science Foundation, including projects on the conservation of endangered languages (2007-2008),[5] on the phonetics of consonants in Setswana and Sebirwa (2010 and 2011–2014),[6][7] and as director for doctoral projects on the phonetics of Burmese tones (2009),[8] consonant weakening in Florentine Italian (2007),[9] acquisition of tone in a second language (2015),[10] neutralization of phonemic contrasts in Dutch and Afrikaans (2019),[11] and iconicity in American Sign Language (2020).[12]
She is the author of a well-received introductory textbook to phonetics and phonology (Zsiga 2013),[13][14] as well as a textbook on the phonology-phonetics interface (Zsiga 2021).