About Melody

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and a member of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC). My postdoc advisor is Professor MAI Ziyin.

I studied English and Linguistics at Soochow University (BA) and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (MA, PhD). I was supervised by Professor Virginia YIP during my PhD.

My research focuses on child language acquisition using various methodologies: (1) analyzing naturalistic speech of children and their interlocutors to identify learning trajectories of target linguistic structures (e.g., verb compounds, noun-modifying clauses, conditionals); (2) designing behavioral experiments to test comprehension, production, and narrative skills in children; and (3) tracking the language development of multilingual children using standardized tools (e.g., the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). I have studied language acquisition in monolingual contexts (e.g., acquiring Chinese in Northern China), multilingual contexts (e.g., acquiring Chinese as one of the majority languages in Hong Kong), and heritage language contexts (e.g., acquiring Chinese as a minority language in the UK and US). These experiences have given me the versatility to address various practical problems across diverse research topics and methodologies.