Experimental Linguist

Teaching

I regularly offer courses on brain, language, culture, and cognition.

For the Spring of 2026, I will teaching a graduate seminar on "EALC E600: Seminar on Experimental Linguistics of East Asian Languages":

This graduate seminar introduces students to experimental approaches in the study of East Asian languages. The course surveys major experimental methods, including questionnaires, reaction time experiments (e.g., reading and priming), eye-tracking studies, and neurolinguistic techniques such as EEG, fMRI, and MEG. It also explores corpus-based approaches and emerging methodologies involving large language models.

Specific topics will focus on human language processing in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages and will be determined based on the research interests of enrolled students, complemented by the instructor’s selections to ensure balanced coverage across languages and linguistic domains.

Students will take turns presenting research articles, while the instructor provides guidance on how to critically evaluate empirical studies, understand their theoretical motivations, assess methodologies and findings, and formulate original research questions. Students are expected to lead discussions of assigned readings, actively engage in discussions, and develop a research proposal as their final paper.

I'm currently (Fall of 2025) teaching:

EALC-E306/505 Chinese Language and Cognition (Psychology of Chinese)

In the Spring of 2027, I will be offering the following course:

EALC-C421/520 Introduction to Chinese Linguistics

In the summer, I usually offer an online asynchronous course in the first four weeks, titled: E208 Bubble Tea versus Bubble Gum: The Languages and Cultures of East Asia and the World.

The various graduate seminars that I offered in the past years include:

Introduction to Chinese Linguistics
Sentence Processing
East Asian Psycholinguistics (aka. East Asian Languages and Cognition)
The Processing and Acquisition of Tones and Prosody
Experimental Chinese Linguistics
Experimental Linguistics of East Asian Languages
Linguistic Issues in Translations
Rethinking Grammar in Chinese: Theory, Processing, and Pedagogy
Social and Cognitive Aspects of Language Processing

In addition to in-class teaching, I lead weekly lab meetings and accept independent studies and internship in the Language and Cognition Lab.

Previously, I have also been offering an intensive freshman seminar on the relation between linguistic diversity and thinking in IU's Intensive First-Year Seminars. The course title has evolved over the years. My most recent offer was on Language and Thinking: Biases and Illusions.

I teach a summer online (self-paced) course on linguistic diversity. It will be offered in the first four weeks of the summer session:

EALC-E208: Bubble Tea versus Bubble Gum: The Languages and Cultures of East Asia and the World

How different are world languages? Do people speaking different languages think differently? What is the advantage of being multilingual? In which ways can people of different language backgrounds misunderstand each other?

Language, with its complexity and abstractness, is the most important means of communication for human beings of any culture. With about 7,000 living languages spoken around the world today, linguistic diversity is evident, fascinating, yet puzzling. Through this course, students will learn to use East Asian languages—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—as a window to understanding human thinking and communicative behavior. Anyone that has ever been puzzled by and amazed at how a foreign language differs from his or her native language(s) will find this course interesting and relevant.

The key questions that motivate the content and activities in this course are (i) whether knowing a language means thinking in that language, and (ii) how habitual ways of speaking and thinking owing to crosslinguistic differences can lead to potential problems in communication. Through learning to talk about the relation between language and thought, students will be equipped with the analytical tools for describing linguistic diversity, which will further enhance their sensitivity to linguistic communication and facilitate language learning.

The topics of this seminar will include: linguistic consciousness and intuition, crosslinguistic differences in structure, word formation, writing systems, grammar and socioeconomic behaviors, lexical categorization of objects (e.g., mass/count distinctions and classifiers), word order and information organization, numerical cognition, space and frames of reference, metaphors (e.g., space and time, body and emotions), theory of mind, bilingualism, translation and interpreting, and issues in comparing thought processes in the East and the West.

Each topic will be approached from three perspectives:

· What is the nature of human Language?

· How does the mind/brain support Language?

· How does Language interface with your daily life?

Weekly modules for this course:

0-Course introduction & logistics

1-East and West

2-Linguistic typology: East and West

3-Language families

4-Language areas and situations

5-Borrowing words and culture

6-How to make a word: word structures