Academic Staff

Prof. Li Sheng is a Professor and the Departmental Research Committee Chair at the Department of Language Science and Technology and an affiliated member of the Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Northwestern University, USA. Prior to joining PolyU, she held faculty positions at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Delaware from 2007 to 2021. She founded and directs the Language Learning and Bilingualism Lab. 

Her research is characterized by three interrelated themes: language acquisition and disorders in Chinese children, typical and atypical lexical-semantic development, and bilingual language development and assessment.  She studies how learner-internal factors, such as learning capacity and executive functions, environmental factors, such as the quantity and quality of language input, and linguistic factors, such as properties of the to-be-learned languages jointly shape learning outcomes. Through these investigations, she aims to develop psychometrically sound diagnostic tools to facilitate the early and accurate identification of monolingual and bilingual children with language disorders, and to contribute to the design of effective intervention programs.

Prof. Sheng’s research has been funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Spencer Foundation, The National Academy of Education (US), the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, among others.

• Master of Arts, Beijing Normal University
• Doctor of Philosophy, Northwestern University