I obtained a PhD in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania, and am currently working as 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 at my university. 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 was on Korean prosody, which was written to quench the curiosity of my young linguistic self who wanted to know more about the sound system of her native language. After I did my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to expand my research to child language acquisition at the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences of Brown University. Before coming to my current institution, I worked at University at Buffalo, SUNY and Seoul National University.

My research adopts various methodological approaches including quantitative analyses of empirical data obtained from corpora of spontaneous speech or elicited in a lab setting. When working with infants, I primarily use eye-tracking methods to observe babies' minds while they process visual and auditory input. We also use the LENA system to capture infants' every day environment at home through day-long audio recordings. 

My recent research topics include the following:

1. Developmental changes and dynamics in mother-child speech: How, why, and when do mothers change their speech characteristics over the course of child language development?

2. Characteristics of child-directed speech: Is there evidence that mothers systematically enhance certain aspects of their speech directly relevant to language learning? To what extent are those enhancements effects a side effect of other features of CDS? 

3. Mechanism of segmentation in infants' word learning: Infants use stress/accent cues and phrase-boundary cues for segmentation of speech stream. They also use multi-modal cues such as touch, and statistical cues. What are the relative contributions of these cues in infants’ speech segmentation learning different languages? 

4. Effects of input and interaction on infants' linguistic and cognitive development. I have been looking at the amount of reading, musical input as well as child-directed speech on infants' word learning. Recently, I have started looking at the relevance of family's socio-economic status and mothers' working status on child's language outcome.