Research

1. Syntactic ambiguity resolution

In this line of research, I am interested in how people use linguistic cues to resolve structural ambiguities and how their syntactic representations adapt through exposure.

Liu, Z., & Lin, C. J. C. (2025). EXPRESS: Plausibility leads to better comprehension but not syntactic adaptation: Evidence from structural disambiguation in Chinese. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 0(ja).

Liu, Z., Lin, C. J. C. (2025). Grammar in Syntactic Adaptations of Chinese: The State of the Art. In: Teng, SH., Chang, LP., Liu, TH. (eds) Handbook of Chinese Language Learning and Technology. Springer, Singapore.

Conference Presentations:

Liu, Z., Lin, C. J. C. (2025). The sound of syntax: Prosodic disambiguation for syntactic branching in a tone language. Poster presentation at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. March 27-29.
Liu, Z., Lin, C. J. C., Nozari, N. (2025). Not lost in the garden path: Large Language Models navigate their way to syntactic knowledge. Poster presentation at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. March 27-29.
Liu, Z., Lin, C. J. C., Nozari, N. (2024). Evaluating large language models surprisal on garden path ambiguity difficulty in English and Mandarin. Poster presentation at Psychonomic Society 65th Annual Meeting, New York City, NY. November 21-24.
Lin, C. J. C. & Liu, Z. (2024). Can semantics and prosody facilitate a syntactically unlikely parse? Talk presentation at FOSS-15: The 15th Workshop on Formal Syntax and Semantics, Taipei, Taiwan. October 12-13.
Liu, Z., Xin, C., & Lin, C. J. C. (2024). Usefulness of prosodic cues in parsing: Evidence from a novel cross-modal maze task. Poster presentation at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. May 16-18.
Liu, Z. & Lin, C. J. C. (2023). Greater prediction error does not lead to better syntactic adaptation: Evidence from Chinese ambiguity resolution. Poster presented at the 29th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-2023), Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain. August 31-September 2.
Liu, Z. & Lin, C. J. C. (2022). Adaptation effects in sentence ambiguity resolution revisited. Poster presented at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. March 24-26 (Virtual).

2. Orthographic processing

This topic concerns written word recognition and orthographic processing in Chinese.

Zhang, M.+, Liu, Z.+, Botezatu, M.R., Dang, Q., Yuan, Q., Han, J., Liu, L, & Guo, T. (2023). A large-scale database of Chinese characters and words collected from elementary school textbooks. Behavior Research Method, 1-26. (+ denotes equal contribution)
Zhang, Z., Yuan, Q., Liu, Z., Zhang, M., Wu, J., Lu, C., Ding, G., & Guo, T. (2021). The cortical organization of writing sequence: evidence from observing Chinese characters in motion. Brain Structure and Function, 1-13.