Faculty
Instructors Teaching the Programme
Assoc Prof Tan Ying Ying
Tan Ying Ying is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Working from approaches and methodologies in the fields of sociophonetics and sociolinguistics, her research primarily focuses on the languages of Singapore, especially Singlish, Singapore English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Min languages like Teochew and Hokkien.
Asst Prof Luke Lu
Luke Lu is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before academia, Luke was a secondary school teacher for five years. He is primarily interested in approaches to interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography, pertaining to issues such as transnational mobility, education, language rights, language planning and policy, and ethnicity. Such research have been published in Language Policy, TESOL Quarterly, and Language in Society. His most recent funded projects involved examining the pedagogical value of Singlish in ELT classrooms, and recovering a grassroots and transnational history of Chinese language reforms in Singapore.
Asst Prof Li Haoze
Li Haoze's research interest lies primarily in semantics and pragmatics, as well as their interactions with syntax. More specifically, he has worked on Mandarin (and its dialects), Cantonese, English, and Japanese in the following areas: meaning of questions, form--meaning mismatches, focus--interrogative interaction, quantification and measurement, sentence-final particles and speech acts, and ellipsis. Although the majority of his work is done with tools in theoretical semantics and syntax, he has started recent collaborative projects incorporating other methods in contemporary linguistics, including experimental linguistics and corpus study.
Dr Christina Low
Christina Low is a Lecturer of Language and Communication at NTU. Her primary research focus lies in Language Variation and Change, particularly in sociophonetic investigations of vowels across speech communities and social groups. She uses vowel inherent spectral change analysis to explore differences that are otherwise not possible to spot in single time point acoustic analysis. Familiar with corpus-based studies and mixed methods research, her other interests include World Englishes and Language Description. Besides English, Christina is interested in Sinitic languages such as Cantonese (Yue) and Hokkien (Southern Min).
Dr Adam John Privitera
Adam John Privitera is a Research Scientist in the Science of Learning in Education Centre, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He earned his PhD from the University of Hong Kong (Faculty of Education) specializing in cognitive science. Adam’s research focuses on the impact of differences in language experience on cognitive control and decision-making, as well as the application of findings from the cognitive and neural sciences to educational policy and practice.
Dr Chloe Castle
Chloe Castle is psycholinguist and sociolinguist with a focus on multilingualism. She is interested in L2/L3 language acquisition, language processing, attrition, divergent attainment, heritage and community languages, morphosyntax, language shift and accommodation.
Dr Geoffrey Benjamin
Geoffrey Benjamin's research interests cover the languages, societies, cultures and musics of the Malay World, Singapore and Indonesia, as well as under-studied issues in general sociocultural theory. His core linguistic publications focus on Austroasiatic (mainly Aslian) and Austronesian languages, with a concentration on Temiar and Malay. He also makes extensive use of linguistic data in his publications on Southeast Asia s sociocultural history.
Dr Hiram Ring
Hiram Ring received his PhD (Linguistics) in 2015 from NTU, Singapore (A Grammar of Pnar). His work involves ethnographic fieldwork on minority languages in India, Myanmar, and Thailand, primarily of the Austroasiatic phylum, with a focus on historical reconstruction of syntax. He combines this with expertise in Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning, leveraging automation to investigate psychological constructs and linguistic phenomena in large text corpora.
Dr Lau Fun
Lau Fun is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Science lab at NTU. She is deeply interested in language research, and is particularly curious about cross-language differences and individual variations in language processing and learning. Her current research endeavours explore various topics on reading and literacy. She has conducted numerous studies on bilingual and biliteracy development in children, examining the pathways to language attainment in different languages and among learners of diverse profiles.
Dr Lee Junwen
With a PhD in Linguistics from Brown University, Junwen's research focuses on how speakers use discourse particles and other expressions to achieve their communicative strategies, and how the semantics of these expressions interacts with non-lexical factors such as illocutionary force and intonation. Besides working in standard varieties of English, he is also interested in non-standard varieties, e.g. Colloquial Singapore English or Singlish.
Dr Niels Kuehlert
Niels Kuehlert received his PhD and MA in Linguistics from Harvard University, specialising in the historical and comparative morphology of the ancient Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Sanskrit) with a focus on their intersection with analogical change. His primary research interests include historical linguistics, formal approaches to morphophonology, and the study of Proto-Indo-European.