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 will present posters at AMLaP 2025!
    Danning Sun will present her work on prediction revision in bilinguals' non-dominant language, Daiwen Gong will present her work on prediction of sound and number information, and Hao Zeng will present present her work on managing conflicting predictions during reading.

    September 2025

    I will present 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

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

    March 2025

    I presented two posters on the role of working memory on prediction at HSP 2025! One of them presented a study with Zifei Wang and Ethan Hui.