Cheng-Yu Hsieh (謝承佑)

I am a PhD candidate funded by Ministry of Education, Taiwan, and a member of Rastle Lab: Literacy, Language, Learning in the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, Unversity of London.

Research Interest

I am a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist interested in how humans read, learn, and process language. My research sits at the intersection of language, cognition, and computational modelling, with a particular focus on how people navigate the ambiguity that is pervasive and inherent in human language.

My PhD investigates how readers make sense of compound words (e.g., armchair, blood bank) through their constituent meanings, especially when a constituent word has multiple meanings/senses depending on context (e.g., bank in blood bank vs in riverbank). I study this phenomenon in Chinese compounds, which are the most common word type in the Chinese writing system (e.g., the word for vase in Chinese is composed of flower and bottle).

Beyond my core research, I am deeply committed to transparent, reproducible, and robust scientific practices. This includes preregistration of studies, open sharing of data and code, and efforts to improve the methodological standards in psychology and psycholinguistics. I have also contributed to methodology-focused projects, including the evaluation of effect size metrics for single-case designs and the application of computational modelling approaches.