He directs the Language and Cognition Lab, working primarily on the interface between grammar, discourse, and cognition. His lab is equipped to conduct behavioral (response time experiments & eye-tracking) and neurolinguistic experiments (electroencephalogram or EEG). His main research interests include processing dependencies in head-final structures (in particular, the comprehension and production of Chinese relative clauses), processing discourse relations (e.g., causals, concessives, counterfactuals, and negation), processing issues in syntactic theorization and grammaticality judgments, thematic role orders, mass/count distinctions and quantity conceptualization in a classifier language, the representation and processing of lexical ambiguity, the perception and acquisition of Chinese vowels in relation to phonetic orthography, processing tone sandhi in Chinese words, phrases and sentences, and the development of speech representations in the second language lexicon. He welcomes students interested in language processing to join his research team.
