About me

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Research interests

My research focuses on prediction during language comprehension and non-native language processing. Language comprehension in a native language is very efficient. While speakers can easily produce 2-5 words per second, native listeners typically have no conscious difficulty in keeping up with the speech and understanding the meaning of the speech.

But such real-time comprehension can be difficult for non-native speakers. Even if they have sufficient vocabulary and a good grammatical knowledge, they may fail to comprehend sentences as efficiently as native speakers do.

My research investigates what makes it difficult to comprehend a non-native language efficiently and explores ways to facilitate non-native language processing with a focus on predictive processing. I am also interested in how orthographic information influences listening comprehension. I mainly use eye-tracking (visual world paradigm), EEG and reaction time measures in my experiments.

Keywords

Psycholinguistics, Language prediction, Non-native language processing, Bilingualism, Sentence comprehension, Orthographic processing, Visual world paradigm, EEG/ERP

Supervision

I am happy to take on MA/PhD students in these areas. Please email me if you are interested :) The deadline for the August admission is 1 November of the previous year. If you are a current BA/MA student and interested in persuing a PhD at NUS, you may be interested in applying for the IRIS@NUS programme.

Open Science

I believe that science must be open and transparent. As a signatory of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, I make all my (anonymised) data and analysis scripts publicly available on my Open Science Framework page whenever possible.

Contacts

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Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
National University of Singapore
Block AS5, 7 Arts Link, 117570 Singapore (Office: AS5-05-11, Psycholinguistics Lab: AS5-02-04)

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+65 65166042

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  • Research Gate
  • Google Scholar
  • Open Science Framework
  • Web of Science (for review records)
  • ORCID
  • GitHub

    • News

    September 2025

    Some of our lab members presented at AMLaP 2025! Danning Sun presented a poster on prediction revision in bilinguals' non-dominant language, Daiwen Gong presented a poster on prediction of sound and number information, and Hao Zeng presented a poster on managing conflicting predictions during reading. Download the posters from our lab page!

    September 2025

    I presented a talk "The role of phonological prediction in comprehension: A meta-analysis" at ESCOP 2025 symposium "SYM-04: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on real-time speech processing: When top-down prediction meets bottom-up input"!

    April 2025

    All papers from our special issue Individual differences in language prediction are now published in Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science!