Contact Information
Office Hours
Research Areas
Biography
I work with Dr. Cynthia Fisher in the Language Acquisition Lab. My research focuses on early language acquisition, particularly syntax development and how children use recent experiences and contextual cues to guide their language learning.
Research Interests
Word learning; Syntax acquisition; Adaptation; Verb bias; Event-based inferences; Situation model; Distributional learning; Contextual and pragmatic influences
Research Description
My research focuses on how children acquire language, particularly examining syntactic adaptation in early word learning. Through looking-time experiments with children aged 18-48 months, I've demonstrated that preschoolers modify their expectations about ambiguous syntactic contexts based on recent input, with these adaptation effects lasting up to one day in 3-year-olds. I provided the first evidence that even toddlers as young as 18 months can adjust syntactic expectations in response to recent experiences.
Beyond syntax acquisition, my work extends to real-time language processing, investigating how children integrate verb semantics with situation models during comprehension. Using eye-tracking methodology, I've shown that children aged 4-5 can process subtle word presuppositions and use them predictively. My ongoing projects examine verb-bias learning in ambiguity resolution and syntactic bootstrapping mechanisms.
Education
- M.S. Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- B.S. Psychology, Peking University, China
Courses Taught
- PSYC 216 Instructor (Spring 2025)
- PSYC 363 Lab Instructor (Fall 2024, Summer 2024, Fall 2023, Summer 2022, Fall 2021)
- PSYC 318 TA (Spring 2024)
- PSYC 216 TA (Fall 2022, Summer 2020, Spring & Fall 2019)
Recent Publications
Yu, Y., Havron, N., & Fisher, C. (2025). Syntactic adaptation and word learning in 3- to 4-year-olds. Language Learning, 75(1), 117–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12661