Advised by: Daphna Heller
We ask questions to gain information. Meanwhile, negative polar questions come with a "speaker bias" such that the speaker strongly expects the answer to be yes. The communicative function of negative questions therefore becomes fuzzy and is an interesting research topic.
Advised by: Dave Kush
Wh-words in Mandarin Chinese have interrogative and non-interrogative uses. How do listeners interpret their functions in real-time language comprehension? Can wh-words trigger a semantic garden path effect?
Advised by: Ming Xiang and Laura Stigliano
My first introduction to linguistic research. I studied memory retrieval in the comprehension of VP ellipsis, and also the syntax of fragment questions in Chinese.
Advised by: Ming Xiang
My BA thesis. The discourse account of island effects attributes the unacceptability of certain long distance dependencies to the conflict of its information status. I further elaborate this "conflict" as a difficulty in generating the proper set of focus alternatives in interpretation.
Advised by: Wing Yee Chow
My MPhil thesis. Using eye-tracking experiments, I study the role of speaker reliability in prediction. The goal is to examine whether listeners adapt their rate of predictive processing in the face of an unpredictable speaker that produces unexpected sentences.
Advised by: Richard Breheny
Expanding on existing secondary inference tasks, I investigate the speaker opinionatedness hypothesis (the epistemic step) in scalar diversity by probing primary inference. Does the speaker's knowledge state affect the rate of scalar implicature made by the listener?