My Work
Language move thoughts between minds (also AGIs). Children are always so successful at language acquisition. WHY? I try to find some hints by conducting massive online studies (MOS), analyzing brain image data, and building computational models.
01
Bilingualism and Brain
I investigate the neuroanatomical variation within bilingualism by applying computer vision and training the Contrastive Variational Autoencoder to disentangle bilingual-specific variation from common variation.
02
MOS and Critical Period
By building a citizen science platform to collect data from millions of Mandarin learners all over the world through an online grammar quiz. I design and fit a computational model on the big dataset to disentangle confounding factors, estimate the critical period of learning Mandarin syntactic knowledge, and resolve the long-lasting debate in second language acquisition.
03
Linguistic similarity
How does linguistic similarity affect second language acquisition? I investigate the effect of native language on second language acquisition and quantify syntactic similarities among languages to examine if the similarities affect the second language learning rate.
04
Computational Models
I review papers about second language acquisition and large language models of bilingualism to compare different models as learning theories. By using state-of-the-art language models and Bayesian models, I examine the computational plausibility of children’s advantage in language acquisition
