Faculty
Instructors Teaching the Programme
Assoc Prof Tan Ying Ying
(Director, MA Linguistics Programme)
(Head, Linguistics and Multilingual Studies)
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 Li Haoze
(Deputy Director, MA Linguistics Programme)
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.
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 Nguyen
Li Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies. She works primarily on language contact, language variation and change, and computational approaches to sociolinguistics. Li has written consistently all on the above topics, with works appearing in top-tier journals such as the International Journal of Bilingualism/Multilingualism and Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She served as consultant for several national linguistic projects in Vietnam and is currently investigating language contact across different Vietnamese diasporas.
Asst Prof Lai Yunfan
Lai Yunfan is primarily a field linguist specialising in Gyalrongic languages, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family that is both endangered and morphologically conservative. His research spans a wide range of domains, from foundational phonetics to complex sentence structures. As a result, he engage with most subfields of linguistics and have published widely, with a particular focus on morphophonology, morphosyntax, linguistic typology, and historical linguistics.
Asst Prof Rachel S.Y.Chen
Rachel S.Y. Chen is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, School of Humanities, where she conducts research and teaching that centers embodied interaction, disability, and the design of interactive environments. She is currently the Medical Humanities co-Coordinator at NTU. Through EMCA, Rachel has worked with non-speaking autistic individuals for over a decade, studying their creative communicative practices that often go amiss. Rachel also maintains an active art practice. As a musician, she has performed internationally in collectives across diverse musical genres. In her design work, Rachel develops inclusive environments that center sound and interactivity. Her work is grounded in collaborations with clinicians, organisations, families, and the disabled community.
Asst Prof Zoe Xi Chen
Zoe is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies. Her research focuses on pragmatics and computational linguistics, as well as their interface with sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. She is especially interested in the intricate relationships between language forms, social contexts, and indexical meanings. She serves as the book review editor for the Journal of Pragmatics and is an editorial board member for Contrastive Pragmatics and Frontiers in Communication.
Asst Prof Byung-Doh Oh
Byung-Doh Oh is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research work aims to advance our understanding of language processing in humans and machines by drawing on techniques from psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and machine learning. He is particularly interested in developing computational models that capture the real-time processing behavior of human language users, and interpretability techniques for studying the predictions and representations of neural networks.
Asst Prof Tamisha Tan
Tamisha Tan is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies whose research investigates morphosyntactic theory through the lens of lesser-studied languages and Historical Linguistics. Her work explores the holistic relationship between collaborative approaches to language documentation, comparative studies of diachronic change, and theoretically-informed models of the underlying structure of synchronic grammar. Focusing on underdescribed Austronesian languages in particular, she investigates the question of how we can reconstruct earlier stages of languages which lack a long written record, and what a deeper understanding of these historical developments can tell us about the structural properties these languages currently exhibit.
Asst Prof Chenzi Xu
Chenzi Xu is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological University and she holds a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Linguistics from the University of Oxford. Her research interests are in phonetics, psychoacoustics, neurolinguistics, and sociophonetics, with a particular focus on tone languages. Her work often uses computational and experimental approaches, bridging phonetic research with speech and language technologies. Her recent work investigates the production and perception of tonal patterns across languages, with a perspective to understanding systematic phonetic variation and its implications for linguistic theory. For more information, please visit her personal website - https://chenzixu.rbind.io/
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.
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 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 Kastoori Kalaivanan
Dr Kastoori Kalaivanan is a Research Fellow with the NTU-Cambridge Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC) and the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES). Trained in linguistics and psychology, her research spans bilingual speech processing and the effects of bilingualism on cognition across the lifespan. She also has experience with sociolinguistic and sociophonetic research looking at language use and shift in Singapore. She has published in leading journals including Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and Language and Speech.
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 Christina Low
Christina Low’s 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).