Chen Yang

Yang works in the fields of psycholinguistics, specifically syntactic processing. She holds master's and PhD degrees in linguistics from the University of Leeds. Her doctoral research reconceptualises how linguistic cues create processing difficulties during sentence comprehension. Through systematic comparison of syntactic, semantic and discourse cues across English and Mandarin Chinese, she  improved existing accounts of sentence processing by showing that similarity-based interference depends on morphological expression rather than mere feature presence. This refined framework resolves some longstanding contradictory findings in psycholinguistics by explaining why some features consistently cause interference while others do not. It also provides testable predictions for the ACT-R sentence processing model.  

Yang's future research direction extends this work into bilingualism while adding computational linguistic methods to complement psycholinguistic approaches, to achieve stronger predictive power. She will investigate how English-Mandarin bilinguals process similarity-based interference compared to monolinguals, addressing a critical gap: current psycholinguistic models are based entirely on monolingual data despite half the world's population being bi-/multilingual. Her key contributions will be developing the first account of bilingual sentence processing, powered by computational modelling within the ACT-R framework, and providing insights into evidence-based pedagogy by identifying which structures require targeted instruction based on L1-L2 morphological differences. 

Yang also teaches syntax at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Leeds. 

Qualifications:

PhD (Psycholinguistics, University of Leeds) 

MA (Linguistics, University of Leeds) 

BA (English language and literature, Xi’an International Studies University) 

Publications

Papers currently under review.

Conferences and Presentations

08/2023 The Illusion: Agreement Attraction in English Relative Clauses. Talk given at World Conference on Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Manchester, UK

06/2022 Binding Relations in Long Passives. Talk given at the Fourth International Symposium on Chinese Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Leeds, UK

06/2021 Similarity-based Interference and Relativised Minimality in Sentence Comprehension. Talk given at the Sixth International Symposium on Psycholinguistics in China (Online), Hangzhou, China