I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Linguistics Department in the University of Canterbury. 

My research uses psycholinguistic methods to investigate how language relates to the human mind and brain.

Specifically, my research program examines what information and how it guides language users’ acquisition and use of form and meaning by testing different languages and populations.

My current research has two strands: (1) cross-linguistic research on reference form-meaning mappings, and (2) developmental research on sentence form-meaning acquisition in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). (see below for more details)

I also explore how bilingual/multilingual speakers represent and adapt their linguistic knowledge based on their multilingual language experience. I am currently involved in research projects that investigate bilingual speakers’ code-switching and language learning via subtitles.

By combining different approaches, my research seeks to uncover the nature of representations and computations that enable us to understand and produce language.

I'm also interested in building and improving language-related artificial intelligence technologies. I am currently partnering with Hollo, a digital mental health intervention platform, to examine the experiences of Hong Kong cancer patients and their attitudes towards digital interventions. This project uses qualitative text analysis augmented with natural language processing (NLP).

more about my research

cross-linguistic research

My cross-linguistic research concerns how speakers of different languages link reduced referring expressions (such as he and she) with intended referents in a discourse. For example, in the sentence Sara practiced taekwondo with Jennifer, speakers can use either the proper name Sara or the pronoun she to refer back to Sara. But the pronoun she is ambiguous because it could refer to either Sara or Jennifer.

I seek to untangle why speakers make the choices they do and what cognitive mechanisms underlie these choices. To answer these questions, I investigate whether speakers of different languages make different choices, and my work on Korean, Mandarin, and English suggests that they do.

My work has practical applications in artificial intelligence, including Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, and computer dialogue systems such as Siri. 

developmental research  

In my developmental research, I compare the acquisition of form and meaning in typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD. I investigate how these children learn to match form and meaning by looking at the effects of different types of input (e.g., interactions with humans vs. computers) in the two groups of children. This work is designed to be a foundation for research-backed language interventions in children with ASD.