Hello! My name is Jinglei Ren. I am a Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland College Park. I am broadly interested in statistical learning across languages and writing systems. 

We are born with exquisite sensitivity to probabilistic information in the environment. This fundamental skill, statistical learning, supports children in learning the basic components of language and reaching language development milestones. Also, statistical learning plays a key role in learning to read. During my Ph.D., I answer questions such as

(1) How does statistical learning develop and improve across sensory modalities and domains? 

(2) How does statistical learning interact with socioeconomic status to influence long-term language and reading development? Would better intrinsic pattern learning abilities help offset the deleterious effects of being raised in an impoverished social environment?

(3) Would second language learners demonstrate the same or different sensitivity to statistical regularities embedded in writing systems as native speakers?

(4) What is the role of explicit instruction in statistical learning?

Before Maryland, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where I majored in psychology and biology, and minored in statistics. My undergraduate research was primarily on language acquisition in infancy and early childhood. I worked in Infant Development and Language Lab (PI: Katherine White)