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Welcome to

Slab Letter

We are based in the Division of Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

News and Events


  1. [Invited Talk] 11/11/2026 Our lab is co-hosting an upcoming talk by Dr. Aini Li with the Center for Language, Cognition and Technology on November 19, 2026—join us!
  2. [Team Update] 26/08/2026 Welcome to our new member Zhongxuan MAO (RA), and congrats to Jiayu LIANG on starting her MPhil study in our lab!
  3. [Grant] 26/08/2026 Our team member Jeremy Yinto CHUI has been awarded the Language Learning Dissertation Grant to support his dissertation research. Congrats!
  4. [Publication] 28/07/2026 A new article, "Towards an attentional theory of second-language speech perception: Evidence from cue ecology", with Prof. Quentin Qin and Jiayu as co-authors, has been published in Cognition. Congrats!
  5. [Conference] 06/07/2026 Congrats to Kangdi, Yuqi, and Jiayu, whose co-authored abstracts with collaborators have been accepted for poster presentation at SNL 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland!
  6. [Team Update] 01/07/2026 Prof. Quentin Qin is promoted to Associate Professor with substantiation in the Division of Humanities at HKUST. Congrats!
  7. [Achievement] 17/05/2026 Our team member Jeremy Yinto CHUI has been accepted into the Bilingualism: Language and Cognition reviewer mentorship program. Congrats!
  8. [Publication] 12/05/2026 Our study "The Attentional Control of Younger and Older Adults in Forced-Attention Dichotic Listening of Cantonese Tones" is published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Congrats!
  9. [Award] 07/05/2026 Our team member Yuqi WANG was awarded the RedBird Academic Excellence Award for Continuing PhD students. Congrats!
  10. [Grant] 05/05/2026 Our project “The Effect of Melodic and Speech Training on Mandarin-Speaking Participants’ Learning of Non-Native Tones: An EEG Study” will be supported by the SHSS Pilot Study Grant Scheme. Congrats!
  11. [Invited Talk] 24/04/2026 Our lab is co-hosting an upcoming talk by Prof. Charles B. Chang with the Center for Chinese Linguistics on April 28, 2026—join us!
  12. [Grant] 20/04/2026 Our team member Jeremy Yinto CHUI was awarded the 2025-2026 Postgraduate Research Grant (HKD 9000) to support his research data collection. Congrats!
  13. [Team Update] 10/03/2026 Our current RA, Jiayu LIANG, has been admitted to the 2026–27 Fall MPhil program and will continue her research in our lab. Congrats!
  14. [Conference] 09/03/2026 Abstract submissions by our team members Jeremy, Yuqi, and Kangdi were all accepted for presentations at HISPhonCog 2026 in Seoul, South Korea. Congrats!
  15. [Conference] 28/01/2026 Our team member Jeremy Chui’s paper has been accepted for presentation at Speech Prosody 2026 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Congrats!
  16. [Grant] 11/12/2025 Our project on older adults' virtual-reality language learning, in collaboration with Prof. Yu CHEN, will be funded by the HKUST-Southeastern University (SEU) Joint Research Seed Fund.
  17. [Grant] 28/11/2025 Our team member Kangdi LIU was awarded the 2025-2026 Postgraduate Research Grant (HKD 9000) to support her research trip to Nanjing for data collection. Congrats!
  18. [Award] 21/11/2025 Our team member Kangdi Liu has received the 2025 LSHK Outstanding Thesis Award for her MPhil thesis. She will present her thesis at the LSHK Annual Research Forum on 6 December 2025. Congrats!
  19. [Conference] 20/10/2025 Congrats to Kangdi, Jiayu, and Yuqi, whose co-authored abstracts with collaborators have been accepted for poster presentation at the 6th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan (Session 4pSC, Speech Perception) in Honolulu, Hawaii!
  20. [Publication] 16/10/2025 Our study "Aging and distributional tone learning: the role of pitch memory in older adults’ discrimination of Mandarin lexical tones" is published in Language and Cognition. Congrats!
  21. [Grant] 30/06/2025 Our project about aging and bilingualism will be funded by the General Research Fund, Research Grants Council (HK), in collaboration with researchers from the University of Macau and Tongji University.
  22. [Publication] 12/05/2025 Our study "The role of prior knowledge in second-language learners’ overnight consolidation of Cantonese tones" is published in Journal of Phonetics. Congrats!
  23. [Conference] 12/05/2025 Our team members Jeremy, Yuqi and Kangdi will give oral presentations at the Joint Postgraduate Student Symposium. Congrats!
  24. [Award] 15/04/2025 Our team member Kangdi LIU was awarded the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship. Congrats!
  25. [Award] 03/04/2025 Our team member Jeremy Yinto CHUI was awarded the RedBird Academic Excellence Award for Continuing PhD students in the 2024/25 Academic Year. Congrats!
  26. [Invited Talk] 26/03/2025 Our lab is co-hosting an upcoming talk by Prof. Eric Pelzl with the Center for Chinese Linguistics on April 24, 2025—join us!
  27. [Publication] 14/03/2025 Our study "Daytime naps consolidate Cantonese tone learning through promoting cross-talker perception: The role of prior knowledge" is published in Brain and Language. Congrats!
  28. [Conference] 05/03/2025 Congrats to Yuqi Wang, whose abstract with Jiayu Liang and Dr. Quentin Qin was accepted as a talk at the 15th International Symposium on Bilingualism in Donostia-San Sebastián.
  29. [Webinar] 05/03/2025 Kangdi Liu will give a talk on "The role of acoustic cues in the checked-unchecked tone merging of the Qixian Jin dialect" at Elinguistics. Please join the webinar if you’re interested!
  30. [Invited Talk] 27/02/2025 Dr. Quentin QIN will give a talk on "What Strategies Reinforce Memory Consolidation of Older Chinese Adults?" at HKUST IEMS (See here for details). Please sign up if you’re interested in attending!
  31. [Achievement] 12/02/2025 Our team member Jeremy Yinto CHUI was admitted to the International Visiting Scholar Program at MARCS institute. Congrats!
  32. [Publication] 24/12/2024 Our study "Individual differences in the distributional learning and overnight consolidation of the Mandarin level-falling tone contrast" is published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
  33. [Publication] 12/12/2024 Our study "The role of acoustic cues in the checked-unchecked tone merging of the Qixian Jin dialect" is published in JASA Express Letters.
  34. [Invited Talk] 25/11/2024 Dr. Quentin QIN gave a talk at Research Back to Back Seminar Series, HKUST.
  35. [Award] 21/10/2024 Our team member Kangdi LIU received the 2024/2025 Dr. Charles Chan Postgraduate Scholarship. Congrats!
  36. [Publication] 08/10/2024 Our preprint paper, "The Role of Prior Knowledge in Second-Language Learners’ Overnight Consolidation of Cantonese Tones", has been published on SSRN. Congrats!
  37. [Conference] 26/08/2024 Jeremy (Poster No. 30) and Yuqi (Poster No. 36) gave poster presentations at CogSci 2024 Hong Kong Meetup.
  38. [Team Update] 05/08/2024 Jiayu LIANG, who graduated from Shandong University, joined our lab as RA!
  39. [Conference] 02/08/2024 Jeremy presented our Aging project at the 9th Golden Age Expo and Summit (GAES).
  40. [Achievement] 31/07/2024 Yuqi successfully defended her MPhil thesis titled "Cantonese Tone Processing in the Forced-attention Dichotic Listening Task by Cantonese-dominant Bilingual Speakers".
  41. [Publication] 11/06/2024 Our study "Distributional learning and overnight consolidation of non-native tonal contrasts by tonal language speakers" is published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
  42. [Publication] 06/06/2024 Our study "The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study" is published in Linguistics Vanguard.
  43. [Award] 21/05/2024 Our team member Kangdi LIU was awarded the 2023-2024 Postgraduate Research Grant for the Division of Humanities.
  44. [Grant] 23/04/2024 Dr. Quentin QIN was offered an Early Career Travel Award for the 186th ASA Meeting in Canada.
  45. [Award] 12/04/2024 Our team member Yuqi WANG was awarded the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship. Congrats!
  46. [Publication] 10/04/2024 Our new article about L2/L3 tone perception was published in Second Language Research.
  47. [Achievement] 19/03/2024 An interview featuring our sleep and language learning research was published in Hong Kong Wen Wei Po.
  48. [Conference] 01/03/2024 Three studies led by students were accepted to the ASA (Ottawa) and the ASA (HK) meetings.
  49. [Conference] 18/11/2023 Keep an eye on our team's work presented at TAI 2023 in Singapore and AMLap Asia 2023 in Hong Kong.
  50. [Award] 03/10/2023 Our team member Yuqi WANG received Dr. Charles Chan Postgraduate Scholarship 2023/24 for her academic achievement.
  51. [Team Update] 01/09/2023 Welcome to our new member Kangdi LIU (RPG) and Susu LAI (RA)! And farewell to our team alum Ruofan.
  52. [Conference] 07/08/2023 Our research team have two papers (ID: 157 and 499) presented at the ICPhS 2023 in Prague. Please stop by!
  53. [Grant] 01/07/2023 Our project about tone learning and memory will be funded by Early Career Scheme, Research Grants Council (Hong Kong).
  54. [Award] 23/05/2023 Jeremy and Ruofan were awarded the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship for PhD studies. Congrats!
  55. [Conference] 09/05/2023 Yuqi's paper was accepted for oral presentation to the FoCaL-6 in Hong Kong.
  56. [Conference] 24/03/2023 Our paper was accepted to the HISPhonCog 2023 in Seoul, Korea.
  57. [Job Posting] 01/02/2023 We are looking for a Research Assistant/Post-doctoral Fellow. Please apply here. The deadline is 28 Feb, 2023.
  58. [Grant] 01/01/2023 Our eye-tracking project collaborating with Dr. Jingwei Zhang will be funded by the Multiple-Year Research Grant, Macau.
  59. [Award] 15/10/2022 Our team member Jeremy Chui (RPG) received Dr. Charles Chan Postgraduate Scholarship 2022/23.
  60. [Grant] 01/10/2022 Our project about sleep and mental health was funded by Sustainable Smart Campus as a Living Lab Project.
  61. [Grant] 01/09/2022 Our project about ageing and language learning was funded by HKUST IEMS Research Grants.
  62. [Team Update] 01/09/2022 Welcome to two new members Ruofan WU (RA) and Yuqi WANG (RPG)! And farewell to our team alum Rui Jin.

We are interested in...


Second-language learning of speech prosody

It is well established that the first language (L1) is claimed to be responsible for second-language learners’ (in)ability to process sounds in a new language. However, the conditions under which the L1 facilitates or inhibits the learning of new sounds have yet to be understood. Adopting phonetic and psycholinguistic approaches, our research focuses on how lexical tones (Mandarin tones: /pā/ ‘eight’ T1, /pá/ ‘to pull out’ T2, /pǎ/ ‘to hold’ T3, /pà/ ‘father’ T4) and lexical stress (English stress: DEsert vs. deSERT) are processed by adult second-language learners who speak different languages as L1.

Mandarin-speaking Students Wanted —> Stress Project & CSWL Project

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Sleep-dependent consolidation of lexical tones

Recent evidence shows that sleep plays a crucial role in transforming newly acquired linguistic knowledge into long-term memory. Given unique characteristics of lexical tones (e.g., high talker-variability of pitch), there is still a vast unexplored area in sleep-mediated memory consolidation of tone learning. By combining behavioral experiments and brain imaging technologies (e.g., EEG), we are dedicated to exploring the relationship between sleep and tone learning, providing memory-based insights for cross-language and cross-age learning of lexical tones.

English-speaking/South Asian Participants Wanted —> Nap Project & Sleep Project

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Aging, cognitive, and language learning

Our research is concerned with the well-being of the aging population. Older adults are facing the challenges of age-related dysfunction in language learning and cognition (e.g., memory and attention). Indeed, recent projects have aimed at investigating older adults’ decline in lexical tone learning and the possible relationship with cognitive ability. We also attempt to find evidence that multilingual language experiences (including learning a new language) can mitigate cognitive decline and promote healthy aging.

Cantonese-speaking Older Adults Wanted —> CSWL Older Adult Project

Cantonese-speaking Younger Adults Wanted —> Bilingual Training Project

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Contact us!


​Email: slablab@ust.hk
Location: Room G005,
Cheng Yu Tung Building,
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong