I obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and am currently an Associate Professor at Chosun University in Korea. At my university, I am the principal investigator of the Child Language Lab, where we investigate young children's linguistic and cognitive development. I am also the founding director of the recently established Center for Data Science in Humanities.
Within the global academic community, I serve as a member of the Governing Board at Manybabies, a global consortium of developmental researchers. Additionally, I hold the position of Associate Editor at the Journal of Child Language, and am on the Editorial Board of Infancy.
My Ph.D. thesis focused on Korean prosody, driven by my early linguistic curiosity about the sound system of my native language. After completing my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to expand my research into child language acquisition at the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. Before joining my current institution, I worked at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and Seoul National University.
My research employs various methodological approaches, including quantitative analyses of empirical data obtained from corpora of spontaneous speech or data elicited in a lab setting. When working with infants, I primarily use eye-tracking methods to observe how babies process visual and auditory input. We also use the LENA system to capture infants' everyday environments at home through day-long audio recordings.
My research topics include the following:
Developmental Changes and Dynamics in Mother-Child Speech: Investigating how, why, and when mothers alter their speech characteristics over the course of child language development.
Characteristics of Child-Directed Speech (CDS): Exploring whether mothers systematically enhance specific aspects of their speech that are directly relevant to language learning. To what extent are these enhancements side effects of other features of CDS?
Mechanisms of Segmentation in Infants' Word Learning: Examining how infants use stress/accent cues, phrase-boundary cues, multimodal cues such as touch, and statistical cues to segment speech. What are the relative contributions of these cues in infants’ speech segmentation across different languages?
Effects of Input and Interaction on Infants' Linguistic and Cognitive Development: Analyzing the impact of reading, musical input, and child-directed speech on infants' word learning. Recently, I have also started examining the influence of family socio-economic status and mothers' working status on child language outcomes.