Welcome!
About me
I am broadly interested in speech science and speech learning, with the long-term ambition to develop individualized yet easy-to-access behavioral and neuromodulation procedures to help those in need.
My skill set includes behavioral experiments (including eye-tracking and sensorimotor adaptation), EEG (ERP and neural oscillations), and neuromodulation (primarily vagus nerve stimulation and TMS). The potential to connect formal linguistic theories, psychological validity, biological feasibility, and practical application is perhaps my largest asset.
As a high-functioning autistic and multilingual, I view the communication needs of people from all backgrounds with equal significance: children with developmental speech disorders, elderly experiencing age-related hearing loss, patients undergoing rehabilitation, and late learners of an additional language.
My research consists of two mutually enhancing pursuits across disciplines (communication sciences & disorders, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience).
Basic research for understanding the representations and processing mechanisms (sensory, motor, linguistic, neurophysiological, and cognitive) that support speech and its learning.
Using the knowledge gained from the basic science of human communication to develop individualized yet easy-to-access behavioral and neuromodulation procedures to enhance speech processing and improve speech learning outcomes.
My strong internal drive to gain a comprehensive, big-picture understanding of speech has guided my research experience along the entire speech chain: psycholinguistics of speech production, speech motor control, acoustics, and speech perception, using behavioral experiments (including eye-tracking and sensorimotor adaptation), EEG (ERP and neural oscillations), and neuromodulation (primarily vagus nerve stimulation and TMS). You can find more information about my work from the “Research Highlights”, the "Publications", and the “Knowledge Trees”.
I am currently working at the Speech Motor Neuroscience Group at Waisman Center (University of Wisconsin-Madison), a joint force of the Brain, Language, and Acoustic Behavior Lab (PI: Caroline Niziolek) and the Speech Motor Action + Control Lab (PI: Ben Parrell) as a postdoc. Our group is developing speech sensorimotor adaptation as a speech intervention tool.
I am expanding my research into non-invasive neural stimulation, such as transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), to enhance speech processing and improve speech learning outcomes. I am preparing an NIH grant to conduct the first systematic evaluation of tVNS’s potential to improve sensory, sensorimotor, and motor functions in the speech of healthy adults.
I grew up in the literal center of Chongqing, a city one may have never heard of, but is the largest city by administrative area in the world (area: 31,791 mi2; population: 32.05 million). Although I can perceive and produce the /in/ and /iŋ/ contrast in Mandarin Chinese, I pretend to have an accent by merging them when speaking Mandarin.
If you are looking for it, here is my CV (updated on January, 3rd, 2024).
Contact info
Rm 483, Waisman Center
1500 Highland Ave, Madison, WI, 53705