Educational Background & Work Experience

Employment and Education

• Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, East China Normal University
• Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University
• Master of Research, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University

Teaching and Research

Research Areas

• Language and cognitive development in children

• Mental lexicon representation (semantic, phonological, multidimensional)

• Semantic (mis)alignment across languages, cultures, and individuals

• Reading acquisition

Research Methods

• Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments (behavioral, eye-tracking, fMRI, EEG)

• Computational modeling

• Database construction and analysis

Publications

• Li, L. ^#, Song, M., Cai, Q. (2025). The words children hear and see: Lexical diversity across-modalities and its impact on lexical development. Developmental Science, 28(2), e13601.
• Li, L.^#, Hu, T., & Liu, S. (2024). Graded phonological neighborhood effects on lexical retrieval: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Memory and Language, 137, 104526. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2024.104526.
• Yang, Y. ^#, Li, L.^#, de Deyne, S., Li, B., Wang, J., & Cai, Q. (2024). Unraveling lexical semantics in the brain: Comparing internal, external, and hybrid language models. Human Brain Mapping, 45(1), e26546. DOI: 10.1002/hbm.26546.
• Li, L.^#, Zhao, W.-T., Song, M., Wang, J. *, & Cai, Q.* (2023). CCLOOW: Chinese children’s lexicon of oral words. Behavior Research Methods. DOI: 10.3758/s13428-023-02077-6.
• Wang, H-C. ^#*, Li, L., Xu Rattanasone, N., Beyersmann, L., Demuth, K., Castles, A. (2023). Morphological effects on orthographic learning in monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Chinese-English-speaking children. Scientific Studies of Reading. DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2023.2217965.
• Li, L.^#, Yang, Y., Song, M., Fang, S. Y., Zhang, M.Y., Chen, Q. R., & Cai, Q*. (2022). CCLOWW: A grade-level Chinese children’s lexicon of written words. Behavior Research Methods. DOI: 10.3758/s13428-022-01890-9.
• Wang, X., Li, L., & McMurray, B. (2022). Cross-modal perceptual learning in learning a tonal language. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44, No. 44).
• Li, L.^#, Marinus, E., Castles, A., & Wang, H. C. (2021). Oral vocabulary affects children’s orthographic learning in Chinese. Reading and Writing, 34(6), 1369-1385.
• Li, L.^#*, Marinus, E., Castles, A., Hsieh, M. L., & Wang, H. C. (2020). Semantic and phonological decoding in children’s orthographic learning in Chinese. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(4), 319-334.
• Li, L.^#*, Wang, H-C., Castles, A., Hsieh, M-L., and Marinus, E. (2018). Phonetic radicals, not phonological coding systems, support orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese. Cognition, 176, 184-194.

Grants and Funding

• National Social Science Fund of China, Children’s Semantic Development and Database Construction Based on Lexical Semantic Networks, Principal Investigator, 2023-2027

• The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, A Study on Children’s Semantic Network Based on Free Associations, Principal Investigator, 2022 - 2023

• The Open Research Fund of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Function Genomics, Semantic Development of Preschool Children, Principal Investigator, 2022-2022

• National Natural Science Foundation of China, Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Semantic Norms and Semantic Integration Based on Lexical Semantic Networks, Co-Investigator, 2020-2023