Dr. Siying Liu

Education background:

Bachelor of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Master of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK.

Doctor of Developmental and Educational Psychology, East China Normal University.

Research focus: infant and child language development

Head of the Infant and Child Laboratory. The laboratory continues to recruit students and volunteers who are interested in language acquisition related topics.

Liu, S., Li ,X., & Xia, S. (in press). Cracking the Syntactic Code: 3-Year-Old Mandarin Learners Use Syntactic Bootstrapping to Identify Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs. Journal of child language.

Liu, S., Li, X., & Wang, Y. (2026). Grasping the Logic Behind: Three-and Four-year-olds’ Understanding of Major Types of Chinese Connectives. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 55(3), 43.

Liu, S., & Li, X. (2025). The influence of masks on children's ability to produce new words. Language learning and development, 21(3), 235-254.

Liu, S., Li ,X., & Sun, R. (2024). The effect of masks on infants’ ability to fast-map and generalize new words. Journal of child language, 51(3):637-655.

Liu, S., & Li, N. (2021). Going virtual in the early years: 30-month-old toddlers recognize commonly used emojis. Infant behavior and development, 63, 101541.

Liu, S., & R, Sun. (2019). Appreciating Language Conventions: Thirteen-Month-Old Chinese Infants Understand That Word Generalization is Shared Practice. Journal of child language,25:1-12.

Liu, S., & R, Sun. (2018). Do Great Minds Prefer Alike? Thirteen-Month-Old Infants Generalize Personal Preferences Across Objects of Like Kind but Not Across People. Front. Psychol. 9:2636.

Horváth, K., Liu, S., & Plunkett, K. (2016). A daytime nap facilitates generalization of word meanings in young toddlers. Sleep, 39(1), 203.      

Grants (as Principal Investigator)

· Youth Fund Project of the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences, China

· China Postdoctoral Science Foundation

1. Language Acquisition (undergraduate and postgraduate course)

2. Introduction to Cognitive Science (undergraduate course)

3. Developmental Psychology (undergraduate course)