I am a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington. I’m interested in psycholinguistics.

My research broadly explores the relationship between language and cognition, with specific interests in sentence & word processing and language learning. Within this broad framework, my work centers on three main areas: 1) Understanding how individuals use linguistic cues–such as syntax, semantics, and prosody–to resolve structural ambiguities during sentence processing; 2) Leveraging recent advances in Large Language Models to gain insights into and simulate human syntactic processing; and 3) investigating written word recognition and orthographic processing in Chinese.

At Indiana University, I work closely with Dr. Chien-Jer Charles Lin in the Language and Cognition Lab. I also collaborate with Dr. Bonnie Nozari in the Language Production and Executive Control Lab. In addition, I work with Dr. Taomei Guo at Beijing Normal University on research related to children’s orthographic processing.

Contact: zepliu [at] iu [dot] edu