Helen Shiyang Lu's Personal Website

Hello! I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia. I work in the Language and Development Lab and the Infant Studies Centre under the guidance of Dr. Alexis Black and Dr. Janet Werker. My postdoctoral research is supported by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2026-2028) and was previously supported by a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2024-2026).

Prior to joining UBC, I completed my PhD in Psychology, with a minor in Quantitative Methods, at the University of Southern California, where I worked in the USC Language Development Lab under the guidance of Dr. Toby Mintz. Before then, I was an undergraduate student studying Psychology and Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

I study how babies begin to learn language from the speech they hear every day. Even before they understand many words, infants are tracking patterns in the sounds around them and using those patterns to start finding structure in language. My work examines how infants detect these patterns, how early perceptual biases guide learning, and how growing up in a bi-/multilingual environment may shape these processes. Much of my current work focuses on how infants find words in continuous speech, including how monolingual and bilingual infants learning English and Cantonese weigh different cues to word boundaries, how sensitivity to sound patterns such as vowel harmony develops in infancy, and, in new EEG work, how the infant brain tracks patterns in speech as it unfolds. You can read more about my past and current projects on the research page.

I was born and raised in Shenzhen, China, and I adopted two cats, Ephesus and FatChoy (photos here).