Overview
Language is the wisdom that we are blessed with, and more importantly, build up together. My research experiences stretch across two aspects of early language learning, namely the inner cognitive mechanism and the environmental factors. For the former, I have been intrigued by infants’ spoken word recognition and children’s social-cognition development. For the latter, I am always interested in parent-child interaction and parental decontextualized talk. These two aspects, usually being looked at separately though, intrigue me to think about the potential interaction in between: How do children learn abstract words from parental input? Does the input also contribute to children’s learning ability, apart from providing linguistic data?
Toolbox
- Statistics: Multilevel Models, Growth Curve Analysis, Structural Equation Modeling
- Software: R, CLAN, Tableau, RapidMiner
- Qualitative Methods: Naturalistic Observation, Thematic Analysis
Ongoing Projects
(*: independent research)
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Tseltal Adults’ Responses to Children in Turn-taking
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Early Word Learning through Overheard Speech
- Development of Children’s Meta-cognition across Cultures
- Know and think are the most commonly used cognitive words in English. However, little is known about how these two words are acquired and used by young children over the course of their development. Research on how children use the two words can shed light on the development of meta-cognition, especially children’s understanding of belief and knowledge.
- Poster under review at Biennial Conference of the Cognitive Development Society 2022
- Early Math Learning in Chinese Families
- Children demonstrate various levels of mathematical skills even before formal schooling, with Chinese children consistently showing superior performance. By examining families in China, this study aims to detect how Chinese parenting support early math learning. Another purpose of our research is to understand whether and how multiple factors in the early home environment, such as socio-economic background, parental beliefs, and child gender shape children’s mathematical experiences under Chinese social and cultural contexts.
- Rural Teacher Training for One Village One Preschool Project*
- One Village One Preschool is the only nation-wide early child education intervention in rural China. Having expanded the ECE access to over 60,000 children in 11 provinces in mountainous midwest parts of China, the project now aims to lift the quality of the intervention. The current research aims to contribute to this process by examining whether the professional development for local teachers successfully promotes classroom quality and satisfies teachers’ needs. Suggestions are also discussed on how to improve rural teacher training.
Completed Projects
(*: independent research)
- Spoken Word Recognition in Mandarin-speaking Toddlers*
- Previous studies on the process of spoken word recognition show that the phonological activation precedes the semantic activation for both toddlers and adults. While these findings are mainly based on Indo-European languages, whether this phenomena is universal remains to be examined. This study aimed to figure out the pattern of phonological and semantic activations during spoken words recognition in native Mandarin-speaking toddlers. Results demonstrated that, for the 2.5-year-olds, there was a phonological activation within 1300 ms after target words and no semantic activation. For the 3.5-year-olds, there was no phonological activation and a semantic activation emerged later than 1300 ms after target words. We argue that the early phonological activation and the late semantic activation are not universal but are influenced by the languages and ages.
- Poster at the 2019 Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development
- Understanding what makes a successful teacher-coach relationship*
- In this study, we aimed to uncover positive factors contributing to a successful teachercoach relationship in the Boston Universal Pre-K program, as well as, factors coaches faced difficulty in. According to the interviews from seven coaches, the most reported positive themes were customized coaching plans and emotional intelligence-based leadership. However, the establishment of a distributed leadership between teachers, coaches and directors was reported as lacking and needed improvement. In addition, coaches cited time and lack of professional development resources as barriers. Together, these findings have potential implications to support teachers, coaches and program directors in establishing successful teacher-coach relationships.
- Panel Talk at HGSE Student Research Symposium
- The relationship between forgiveness and aggression: A meta-analysis among adolescents and university students
- Whether high or low levels of forgiveness are associated with increased aggression remained a topic of debate. Most argued that aggression was linked to low levels of forgiveness, though this stance was disputed by some. This meta-analysis examined the relationship between forgiveness and aggression to provide conclusive evidence on this debate and explores how various variables moderate this relationship. We identified 36 primary studies with 21,407 participants. The results indicated a medium negative correlation between forgiveness and aggression. Furthermore, forgiveness measures, participators’ cultural background, age group, and gender moderated this link. The correlation between forgiveness and aggression was stronger (1) when forgiveness was measured with the HFS, FS, and the TFS than when forgiveness was measured with other instruments; (2) when aggression was measured with AQ than other measures; (3) for the Eastern group than for the Western group; (4) among university students than adolescent students. (5) In male-predominant samples, the negative correlation between forgiveness and aggression was larger.
Notable Coursework
- Peers matter: how does mental/behavior health predict academic performance
- The development of imagination in children