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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

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