Academic Staff

I am trained in phonetics and psycholinguistics. A central theme of my research is to understand the various forces that shape the way of how language is processed and used by humans. I am most interested in the influence from 

• language-internal features (e.g., phonological neighborhood density, constituent weight) and usage-based features (frequency, predictability)
• characteristics of the user (e.g., bilingualism, speaker/listener attitudes and biases)
• characteristics of the interlocutor (e.g., audience design, phonetic imitation, human-computer interaction) and the linguistic community (e.g., generational variations)

My research integrates insights from linguistics, psychology, social science, and cognitive neuroscience. The research methods I use are heavily data-driven and empirical based. Both corpus-based quantitative analyses and lab-based experimental methods (behavioral, physiological, cognitive, and neural measures) are commonly used in my research. Together with my collaborators, I have worked on Chinese (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese), English, and French.

• Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
• M.A. in Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
• B.Eng. in Information Technology (1st Honour), City University of Hong Kong