Professor of Psychology and Associate Director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
She received her PhD from Yale University, and was a Fellow in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows , Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Visiting Scholar at Nanyang Technological University and Tokyo Women's Christian University. For the past four years, she has also served as Senior Curriculum Advisor to ABCmouse, with development of a web-based set of animations for English language learners.
Her primary research interests explore relationships between language, culture, and cognition with a focus on early language learning and predictors of reading in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Her work includes naturalistic, experimental, and brain-imaging studies of word learning in children and adults.
She has led large, international research teams in the norming of vocabulary and syntax instruments and has examined language and reading development in Chinese- and Spanish-English bilinguals.
She is currently examining the effects of online materials on reading comprehension and for teaching language.