Yaling Hsiao

Yaling Hsiao

School of Education
Assistant Professor

Contact details

Address
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Yaling research focuses on literacy development and language processing. She is particularly interested in how linguistic input shapes the way humans learn and process words and sentences. For example, why are certain words and sentences more difficult to read or understand than the others? Why are some people better at reading or language comprehension? What is the link between comprehension and production? How do children learn to read and become skilled readers? She uses a variety of methods to investigate these issues, e.g. corpus analysis, computational modelling, behavioural experiments.

Google Scholar

Qualifications

  • PhD in Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015
  • Ed.M. in Mind, Brain and Education, Harvard University, 2008

Teaching

  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Contemporary Issues in Education (modules include "Engaging with Research" and "Higher Education")
  • Introduction to Developmental Psychology
  • Research Project/Dissertation

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Hsiao, Y, Dawson, NJ, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2024, 'A corpus-based developmental investigation of linguistic complexity in children's writing', Applied Corpus Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 1, 100084. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2024.100084

Dong, Y, Hsiao, Y-L, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2024, 'The Emotional Content of Children's Writing: A Data-Driven Approach', Cognitive Science, vol. 48, no. 3, e13423. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13423

Dawson, N, Hsiao, Y-L, Tan, AWM, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2023, 'Effects of Target Age and Genre on Morphological Complexity in Children’s Reading Material', Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 529-556. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2206574

Nation, K, Dawson, NJ & Hsiao, Y 2022, 'Book language and its implications for children’s language, literacy, and development', Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 375-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221103264

Taylor, E, Nation, K & Hsiao, Y 2022, 'Context availability and sentence availability ratings for 3,000 English words and their association with lexical processing', Journal of Cognition, vol. 5, no. 1, 20. https://doi.org/10.5334/JOC.211

Hsiao, Y, Dawson, NJ, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2022, 'The nature and frequency of relative clauses in the language children hear and the language children read: a developmental cross-corpus analysis of English complex grammar', Journal of Child Language. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000957

Mak, MHC, Hsiao, Y & Nation, K 2021, 'Anchoring and contextual variation in the early stages of incidental word learning during reading', Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 118, 104203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104203

Hsiao, Y, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2021, 'Boys write about boys: androcentrism in children’s reading experience and its emergence in children’s own writing', Child Development, vol. 92, no. 6, pp. 2194-2204. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13623

Dawson, NJ, Hsiao, Y-L, Tan, AWM, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2021, 'Features of lexical richness in children's books: comparisons with child-directed speech', Language Development Research, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 9-53. https://doi.org/10.34842/5we1-yk94

Mak, MHC, Hsiao, Y & Nation, K 2021, 'Lexical connectivity effects in immediate serial recall of words', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 1971-1997. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001089

Pagán, A, Bird, M, Hsiao, Y & Nation, K 2020, 'Both Semantic Diversity and Frequency Influence Children’s Sentence Reading', Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 356-364. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1670664

Hsiao, Y, Bird, M, Norris, H, Pagán, A & Nation, K 2020, 'The influence of item-level contextual history on lexical and semantic judgments by children and adults.', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 12, pp. 2367-2383. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000795

Abstract

Dong, Y, Nation, K, Hsiao, Y-L & Dawson, N 2023, 'The Development in Emotional Content of Children’s Writing: Are Children Getting Less Happy?', Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 45, pp. 1132-1132. <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j3605ts>

Conference contribution

Hsiao, Y-L, Mak, MHC & Nation, K 2022, The Effect of Semantic Diversity on Serial Recall for Words. in Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The Cognitive Science Society, pp. 3284-3284. <https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cogsci19_proceedings-8July2019-compressed.pdf>

Preprint

Hsiao, Y-L, Dawson, NJ, Banerji, N & Nation, K 2022 'A corpus-based developmental investigation of lexical richness and syntactic complexity in children's written stories' SSRN. <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4198377>