YANG Yang

Associate Professor | Master's Supervisor

 

Contact Address

Room 607, Building 8, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

No. 2, North Baiyun Avenue, Baiyun District, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

 

Email

yangyanggw@gdufs.edu.cn

 

Research Interests

Psycholinguistics (especially sentence processing), Neurolinguistics

Syntax-Prosody Interface, Second Language Acquisition, Developmental Language Disorders

 

Education

2013/08–2018/05 Ph.D. in Linguistics, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Netherlands

Supervisors: Prof. Lisa L.-S. Cheng (Syntax) & Prof. Niels O. Schiller (Psycholinguistics)

2012/02–2012/11  Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology/Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University

2010/09–2013/03  M.A. in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies University

Supervisors: Prof. WU Fuyun, Prof. XU Yulong

 

Professional Experience

2018/07–Present Associate Professor, Master's Supervisor, "Yunshan Young Scholar"

Research Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

2013–2018  Research Assistant, Leiden University. Participated in NWO (Dutch Research Council) project: Understanding wh-questions

 

Honors/Awards

2022–Present Vice Chair, Learning and Developmental Disorders Rehabilitation Branch, Guangdong Rehabilitation Medical Association

2024        Second Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement, GDUFS

2022–2023   First Prize for Outstanding Teaching Award, GDUFS

Outstanding Undergraduate Supervisor, GDUFS

2020–2021   Outstanding Faculty Award, Excellent Teacher Award, GDUFS

2020        Outstanding Research Achievement Award, GDUFS

Excellent Performance in Faculty Annual Review, GDUFS

2012/12    National Graduate Scholarship (Top 0.2%, Ministry of Education, China)

 

2007/11 National Undergraduate Scholarship (Top 0.2%, Ministry of Education, China)

 

Grants (Principal Investigator)

2025  Guangdong Philosophy and Social Sciences Youth Project (Ongoing)

Perceptual Studies of Cantonese Tones: Behavioral and ERP Evidence

 

2024  Guangdong Provincial Education Department Youth Project (Ongoing)

Cognitive Mechanisms of Syntax-Prosody Interaction in Children with Developmental Language Disorder

 

2019  Guangdong Philosophy and Social Sciences Youth Project (Completed)

Syntax-Prosody Interface in Mandarin-Speaking Children with SLI

 

2019  Guangzhou Philosophy and Social Sciences Project (Completed)

Language Acquisition and Cognitive Development in Cantonese- vs. Mandarin-Speaking Children

 

2018  Guangdong Provincial Education Department Youth Project (Completed)

Background Propositions in Chinese: A Case Study of "Genben" and "Benlai"

 

Collaborative Research Projects

2024  Major Project of National Social Science Fund

Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Child Language Development: Clinical Applications and Database Construction

 

2018  Major Project of National Social Science Fund

Generative Grammar Studies and Theoretical Innovation in Chinese

Linguistics

 

Academic Monograph

Yang, Y. (2018). The Two Sides of wh-Indeterminates in Mandarin—A Prosodic and Processing Account. LOT Publications: Netherlands.

 

Selected Journal Publications in the past five years

u Pablos, L., Yang, Y., Doejes, J., & Cheng, L. (2025). Do readers anticipate wh-in-situ questions? Cross-linguistic reading time evidence from Mandarin Chinese and French. Applied Psycholinguistics, 46(9), 1–34.

u Chen, C. & Yang, Y.* (2025). The phonology (prosody)-syntax interface in Developmental Language Disorder. International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 12(1), 94–116.

u Yang, Y. & Shi, D. (2024). Theoretical development and innovation in Chinese linguistics under the influence of generative grammar. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 56(2), 202–213. (Original in Chinese)

u Yang, Y., Gussenhoven, C., Reshetnikova, V., & van de Ven, M. (2024). Functional and phonetic determinants of categorical perception in two varieties of Chinese. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, 642–646.

u Hao, H., Hahn, M., & Yang, Y.* (2024). Information locality in the processing of classifier-noun dependencies in Mandarin Chinese. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1212–1219.

u Yang, Y., Gussenhoven, C., Reshetnikova, V., & van de Ven, M. (2023). Challenging categorical perception of lexical tone and gradient perception of intonation: Evidence from Cantonese identification and discrimination studies. Proceedings of Tonal Aspects of Languages 2023, 51–52.

u Yang, Y., Pablos, L., & Cheng, L. (2023). The processing mechanisms of Mandarin wh-questions. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 51(1), 147–171.

u Shi, D. & Yang, Y. (2023). Language disorders and speech therapy in China: Current status and developmental strategies. Ethnic Language Application, 3, 184–195. (Original in Chinese)

u Shen, B., Wang, Y., Yang, Y., & Yu, X. (2023). Relationships between Chinese university EFL learners’ academic emotions and self-regulated learning strategies: A structural equation model. Language Teaching Research, 27(3), 1–26.

u Yang, Y. & Tsai, W.-T. (2022). Pairing and weighting: An experimental study on the prosody-syntax interface in Chinese bare conditionals. Chinese Teaching in the World, 36(4), 490–502. (Original in Chinese)

u Yang, Y. & Shi, D. (2022). Constructing theoretical linguistics with Chinese characteristics in the new era. Social Sciences in China Press, April 12, 2022 (Linguistics Section). (Original in Chinese)

u Yang, Y., Gryllia, S., & Cheng, L. (2020). Wh-question or wh-declarative? Prosody makes the difference. Speech Communication, 118, 21–32.

u Yang, Y. & Cheng, L. (2020). Experimental approaches to theoretical linguistics. Modern Foreign Languages, 43(6), 565–874. (Original in Chinese)

u Gryllia, S., Doetjes, J., Yang, Y., & Cheng, L. (2020). Prosody, clause typing, and wh-in-situ: Evidence from Mandarin. Laboratory Phonology, 11(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.169

 

Peer Review Service

Reviewer for the following journals: Linguistics, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Modern Foreign Languages, Studies in Prosodic Grammar, etc.