As a sociolinguist, my principal research interest lies in the sociolinguistics of Mandarin Chinese - how and why speakers vary in their language use and what language variation tells us about the (changing) society in China. My PhD research investigates how young adults in Beijing use local and 'standard' features to negotiate their social identities and gender roles in an increasingly socially-stratified Chinese society. I am particularly interested in phonetic/phonological variation but my doctoral project also looked at lexical and syntactic features.
I find the perception of language (variation) extremely interesting, both as an independent discipline (perceptual dialectology) and as a method to better understand the production of language variation. My MA thesis explores the perception of Neutral Tone variation in 'Standard Chinese' while both my doctoral and postdoctoral projects incorporate the perception and production of dialect features in Chinese.
I'm also a mixed-methods researcher and I use a wide range of different methods to answer research questions: I mainly rely on interviews, self-recordings, surveys, and experiments for data collection, and a mixture of discourse analysis and mixed-effect regressions for analysis. I have also worked on (social) media data before.
Multilingualism and language variation in Shanghai and Ningbo
As part of Strand 2 on the MEITS project, I will be investigate how languages and varieties are used and perceived in China, specifically in Shanghai and Ningbo. I will focus on the co-existence of local dialects, regional varieties of Putonghua, and foreign languages (e.g. English) in these cities and aim to combine different data to look at the effect of multilingualism at micro (e.g. individual, linguistic variable) and macro (education, policy) levels.
Social identity in Beijing
My PhD project investigates a group of university students from working class/lower middle class families in Beijing, looking at both their production and perception of three main Beijing dialect features (use of neutral tone, intensifier 'te' and omission of classifier). My focus is on the social meaning of these features and that of the local vernacular - Beijing Mandarin - especially in comparison with the standard language, Modern Standard Chinese. You can find more information and slides from relevant talks in the 'Downloads' section.
Perception of Neutral Tone variation
I conducted a matched-guise test for my MA dissertation to study how speakers of different varieties of Chinese perceive variation of Neutral Tone in 'Standard Chinese'. I have presented the results at several conferences including NWAV-Asia Pacific 3 and Sociolinguistics Symposium 20. I am currently exploring whether there exists a threshold (e.g. how many NTs do people have to hear) for listeners to be able to perceive any social information, if such information exists.
The media and the Paralympics
This is a project I conducted at the British Library in 2013. As part of a project on media discourse and disability sports, I compared Chinese and English newspaper articles on the 2008 Beijing Paralympics. More information including a bibliography can be found on the British Library website. My article can be downloaded from the 'Downloads' section.