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 2024 admission was 1 November 2023.

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

photo

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)

photo

photo

photo

+65 6516 6042

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

    • News

    March 2024

    Our paper (with Yuki Hirose) on pitch accent predictability effects on spoken word recognition has been published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology!
    We tested effects of pitch accent predictability by exploiting a sandhi rule in Kansai Japanese (my native dialect!). You can download the paper from here or email me for a copy (sorry, it's not open access)!

    October 2023

    Katja Maquate and I are editing a special issue on individual differences in language prediction for Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science! The submission deadline is 30 April 2024. You can find the details here.

    September 2023

    I gave a talk "Automaticity of prediction in language comprehension" at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on 20 September.
    The video recording of the talk is here!

    August 2023

    Our paper (with Huong Thi Thu Nguyen & Pia Knoeferle) on heritage speakers' prediction has been published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition!
    We tested transfer effects from the dominant language (German) on prediction in the heritage language (Vietnamese). You can download the paper from here. (Open access)