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Department of Linguistics,
University of Pennsylvania
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I am a 2nd-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Prof. Anna Papafragou. I received my BA and MA at Tsinghua University, where I was advised by Prof. Peng ZHOU.
My research focuses on the interface between semantics, pragmatics, and language acquisition. I am particularly interested in how speakers and listeners use contextual information to construct and interpret meaning, and how these processes develop in children. Broadly, I investigate how pragmatic inference, informativeness, and discourse structure shape the way linguistic expressions are produced and understood.
Excited to share new results from both projects at HSP 39 and ELM 4 this year. Please come visit my posters during the poster sessions!
In collaboration with Professor Anna Papafragou, I am currently investigating how children derive pragmatic inferences from plural expressions. Specifically, our research explores whether the “more-than-one” interpretation of plurals arises from a scalar implicature and how contextual informativeness guides children’s computation of this inference. By manipulating the relevance of quantity in discourse, we aim to understand when and how pragmatic reasoning supports the acquisition of plural meaning.
Related presentations:
2025, October 11. Meaning in Context: Children’s Understanding of English Plurals. The 11th MACSIM, Johns Hopkins University. [poster]
This project examines how speakers choose among alternative verbs when multiple descriptions of an event are equally true. Focusing on cases where verbs differ in specificity or granularity (e.g., move vs. run), I investigate how considerations of informativeness and pragmatic reasoning guide verb selection. Using experimental approaches, this work aims to clarify how event representations interact with communicative pressures to shape patterns of verb use and interpretation. The core idea and initial experimental design for this project were first developed in collaboration with undergraduate research assistant Isabelle Chapman.
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