Profile picture for Yukun Yu

Contact Information

614 Psychology Building

Office Hours

Fall 2025: Wednesdays 2-4 pm
Visiting Assistant Professor

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 also looks at 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

  • Ph.D. Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • M.S. Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • B.S. Psychology, Peking University, China

Courses Taught

  • PSYC 216 Coordinator & Instructor (Fall 2025)
  • PSYC 363 Instructor (Fall 2025)
  • 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