Cheng-Yu Hsieh (謝承佑)

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

Research Interest

I’m a cognitive psychologist/psycholinguist, fascinated by how humans read, learn, and process language. My research lies at the intersection of language, cognition, and computational modelling, with a focus on how people navigate the ambiguity that is ubiquitous and inherent in human language.

My PhD project investigates how readers make sense of compound words (e.g., armchair, blood bank) via their constituents, 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, the most common word type in the Chinese writing system (e.g., the word for vase in Chinese is composed of flower and bottle).

In addition to my core research, I am deeply committed to transparent, reproducible, and robust research, including preregistration of studies, sharing of data and code, and improving 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 computational modelling approaches.