Menghan Wang
PhD
Menghan Wang is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics. Her research interests include embodiment, image schema, mental representations of spatiality, and first-language and second-language processing. She is proficient in designing and programming behavioral and psycholinguistic experiments (e.g., semantic priming and eye-tracking) integrated with multimodal linguistic and perceptual stimuli. Her studies have been published in Language and Cognition, and Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Her studies have been presented at AAAL in 2024, the International Cognitive Linguistic Conference (ICLC16), and the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB14).
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Thesis
Embodied Mental Simulation in Second Language Processing of English Prepositions
Menghan's thesis applies image-schematic diagrams to investigate mental representations in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) sentence processing. Her thesis focuses on cross-linguistic motion concepts, expressed by directional verbs (jìn and chū) in Mandarin Chinese and prepositions (into and out of) in English. Her studies examined Chinese-English bilingual speakers' mental representations of spatial configurations in processing L1 Mandarin Chinese and L2 English sentences through psycholinguistic experiments, using sentence-diagram verification, self-paced reading interleaved with diagrams, and eye-tracking paradigms. Driven by empirical data, her thesis proposes a new model for simulation-based L2 processing and associated influential factors.
Research interests
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Language Processing
- Language and Cognition
- Second Language Acquisition