People

Without imitating there is no learning. I am interested in how humans use imitation to express what we mean from a multimodal, cognitive, and phonological perspective. In particular, my research investigates how and why communicative imitation sounds or appears different from language to language, and to what extent such imitation is transparent or easily learnable in different contexts. I work with a variety of languages, such as Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Chaoyang (Southern Min), and Hong Kong Sign Language. My PhD laid the groundwork for a methodology which allows one to phonologically identify and argue for semantic relations across ideophones from unrelated languages. Currently, I am collaborating with colleagues on a project which seeks to understand the interaction of hand gestures and guessing accuracy of ideophone meanings from different languages. Another project has us looking at longterm phonological acquisition of Hong Kong Sign Language by hearing adults. Playing with new methodologies and trying out new experimental designs is how I express myself creatively in my academic work. In addition to that, I supervise student research projects ranging from English vowel perception to the linguistic landscape of Shenzhen malls to the euphonics and phonetics of expressive strategies in langsonghui 朗誦會 poetry to the multimodal nature of popular WeChat memes.