About Me

Hi! My name is Muxuan He [mu ɕyan xɤ]. I am a third year PhD student in linguistics at the University of Southern California. I identify myself as a pyscholinguist, and I care about how our language-specific and domain-general knowledge affects sentence processing and information processing. I also have started to work on phonetics (both learning and doing research), particularly devoted to my beloved and unstudied dialect, Wuxue Mandarin.

My current research project examines the effects of informativity on sentence processing(both positive and negative polarities). At the first stage of the project, I attempted to lay a baseline of informativity effects in language comprehension and I found, with relatively little contextual information, affirmative sentences prefer a 'just-right' level of informativity while negative sentences prefer a high level of informativity. As a next step, I attempt to introduce additional informativity cues to the stimuli and further examine whether effects of informativity can be modulated.

Apart from research, I also enjoy photography, music and travelling.



Research Interests

General
  • Psycholinguistics (information-theoretic, pragmatics processing)
  • Computational Linguistics (pragmatic abilities of language models)
  • Phonetics (anticipatory tonal coarticulation)
Details

I am a graduate student at USC Linguistics Department  and I go to Language Processing Lab Meeting.
Details about my research interests can be found here. [See "Where I am going" for current and future directions. See "Where I have been" for previous research)]

Cover photo: Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia. May 2019. (© Muxuan He)