I am Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in Hong Kong. I also serve as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at PolyU. 

I am trained in phonetics and psycholinguistics. A central theme of my research is to understand the various forces that shape the way of how language is processed and used by humans. I am most interested in the influence from

• language-internal features (e.g., phonological neighborhood density, constituent weight) and usage-based features (frequency, predictability)

• characteristics of the user (e.g., bilingualism, speaker/listener attitudes and biases)

• characteristics of the interlocutor (e.g., audience design, phonetic imitation, human-computer interaction) and the linguistic community (e.g., generational variations)

My research integrates insights from linguistics, psychology, social science, and cognitive neuroscience. The research methods I use are heavily data-driven and empirical based. Both corpus-based quantitative analyses and lab-based experimental methods (behavioral, physiological, cognitive, and neural measures) are commonly used in my research.  Together with my collaborators, I have worked on Chinese (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese), English, and French.