Welcome! I am a researcher studying the cognitive science of language. Currently, I'm an MA candidate in the Linguistics programme at the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), in Taipei. There, I work in the Neurolinguistics Lab directed by Prof. Shiaohui Chan.
Beginning from Fall 2024, I will start as a PhD student at the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
I come from sunny multilingual Singapore, and I am of Hokkien-Peranakan and Cantonese heritage. I'm also a first generation grad student (formerly first-gen college student). Before moving to Taipei, I was an exchange student at Providence University in Taichung, Taiwan, where I studied psycholinguistics with Prof. Yuda Lai. Prior to that, I lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I earned my BA in English Communication from Payap University and was advised by the Web-education sociologist Prof. Michael James Day.
To learn more about my professional life, see my CV.
A fun fact about myself is that my great-grandparents were Peter Lim Ah Pin (1890–1943) and Florence Yeo (1887–1962), the namesakes of Lim Ah Pin Road and Florence Road in Kovan, Singapore. My great-grandparents' portraits can be found here.
My current research interests mainly centre on the neuroscience underlying human language abilities. This requires an interdisciplinary perspective, and my process of discovery draws on methods and ideas from experimental neuro-/psycholinguistics, theoretical linguistics (especially syntax and semantics), theoretical neuroscience, and Whiteheadian process philosophy.
I believe that unification between (cognitivist) linguistics and neuroscientific theory is both possible and desirable. This means that the cognitive architecture of language can be described in neurobiological terms. Theoretical linguistics in such a unification, then, can properly be seen as a subfield of theoretical cognitive neuroscience (itself a subfield of a more general science of the human).
In particular, I am interested in how linguistic structure can be explained in terms of structured neurocognitive networks at the scale of cortical minicolumns. This is an idea from Neurocognitive Linguistics which I think has been under-appreciated despite its relevance to modern problems in brain-inspired AI and natural language processing. See my Research (under construction) or Publications page for more details.
I will also be building a Blog where I will post thoughts and musings relevant to cognitive science and linguistics. Stay tuned!
Last updated: 8 Mar 2024