CUHK Language Processing Lab

The Language Processing Lab is based in Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. We are interested in the neural and cognitive processes underlying language production and comprehension in both humans and large language models. In particular, we focus on the following areas of research:

  1. Interlocutor modelling in language communication (e.g., How people take their interlocutor into account in comprehending and producing language)
  2. Handwriting literacy (e.g., What are the neurocognitive mechanisms of handwriting and dysgraphia?)
  3. Mechanistic interpretability of AI (e.g., What are the neurons and circuits responsible for language use in LLMs)
Lab members at a gathering
PhD viva celebration
Lab barbecue gathering
Language Processing Lab group photo

JOINING THE LAB

  1. Positions available The lab is looking for a postdoc or research assistant with good experience in fMRI, Bayesian modelling, or machine learning. If you have such skills, please send your CV to zhenguangcai(at)cuhk.edu.hk.
  2. PhD application The lab has been successful in obtaining three Hong Kong PhD Fellowships and a couple of CUHK scholarships, apart from some departmental studentships. If you want to do a PhD at the lab (and in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages), please send us an email. We are only interested in applicants with a strong empirical/computational background.

NEWS IN THE LAB

  1. 18 September 2026. Our lab has a paper accepted. Dunn, M. S., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). I want to ride my bike/bicycle: Predictivity affects word forms in language production but not in language comprehension. Language and Cognition.
  2. 04 September 2026.Congratulations to Dr Wang Shuqi, who passed her oral defense on 04 September 2026.
  3. 22 August 2026. Our lab has a paper accepted. Duan, X., Yao, Z., Zhou, X., Fu, Z., Kan, B., Wang, Y., Xiao, B., Zhang, H., Tang, X., Nie, E., & Cai, Z. G. (2026). Mechanistic interpretability for understanding language abilities in large language models: A survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026. Association for Computational Linguistics. (to appear)
  4. 22 August 2026. Our lab has a new paper accepted. Duan, X., Xiao, B., Kan, B., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). StimMAS: A multi-agent framework for automated linguistic stimulus construction in psychological research. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
  5. 08 August 2026. Our lab has a new paper accepted. Wang, M., Yu, H., Wang, B., Xu, Z., Cai, Z.G., Huang, C., & Zhao, N. (in press). Single-device In-Sensor Computing for Multi-Channel Multiply-Accumulate Operations. Nature Communications.
  6. 25 June 2026. Our lab has a new paper accepted. Xu, Z., Chen, X., Zhang, C., Longcamp, M., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Developmental dysgraphia from alphabetic to Chinese scripts: A review of neurocognitive mechanisms, classification, and assessment. Developmental Review.
  7. 27 May 2026.Congratulations to Dr Xu Zebo, who passed his oral defense (with no revision needed) on 27 May 2026.
  8. 18 May 2026. Our lab has a paper accepted. Duan, X., Ma, Z., Yao, Z., Li, J., & Cai, Z. G. (2026). Do large language models acquire phrase-based processing? Evidence from eye movements and model-brain alignment after fine-tuning. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2026). Vienna, Austria. (Co-located with the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.)
  9. 21 April. Our lab has a paper accepted. Wang, S., & Cai, Z. G. (2026). Similar predictions, different processes: A multi-level comparison of human and multimodal LLM language prediction.Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2026). Association for Computational Linguistics.
  10. 27 March 2026. Lab members Xufeng and Zebo each gave a talk (one on LLM language learning and the other on assessing character amnesia in children) at 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at MIT. Many congratulations to them for such achievements.
  11. 11 March 2026. Zhang, Y., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Perspective alignment in dialogue: The role of interlocutor's linguistic competence and communicative goals. Cognition.
  12. 11 March 2026. Xu, Z., Yu, S., Torrance, M., Nottbusch, G., Zhao, N., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). A stroke level large-scale database of Chinese character handwriting and the OpenHandWrite_Toolbox for handwriting research. Behavior Research Methods.
  13. 20 Jan 2026.Our lab has a paper accepted. Wu, H., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Speaker effects in language comprehension: An integrative model of language and speaker processing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  14. 19 Jan 2026.Congratulations to Dr Zhang Wenyi, who passed her oral defense on 19 Jan 2026.
  15. 19 Nov 2025.Our lab has a paper accepted. Rao, X., Wu, H. & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Comprehending semantic and syntactic anomalies in text attributed to an LLM versus a human: An ERP study. Applied Psycholinguistics.
  16. 25 Aug 2025.Our lab has a paper accepted. Wu, H., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). When A Man Says He Is Pregnant: ERP Evidence for A Rational Account of Speaker-contextualized Language Comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
  17. 11 Aug 2025.Our lab has a paper accepted. Wu, H., Rao, X., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Probabilistic adaptation of language comprehension for individual speakers: Evidence from neural oscillations. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
  18. 09 Aug 2025. Our lab has a paper accepted. Zhao, N., Duan, X., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). The missing half of language learning in current developmental language models: Exogenous and endogenous linguistic input. Open Mind.
  19. 23 June 2025. We're proud to congratulate our third-year PhD student, Zebo Xu, for being awarded the Postgraduate Research Output Award 2024! Only one student from the Faculty of Arts receives this award each year, and this is the first time that the award has gone to the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages ever since its inception!
  20. 24 May 2025. Our lab has a paper accepted. Xiao, B., Duan, X., Haslett, D. A., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Human-likeness of LLMs in the Mental Lexicon. Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning .
  21. 27 April 2025. Our lab has a paper accepted. Xu, Z., Zhang, Y., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Phonetic and semantic radical priming in Chinese character amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition .
  22. 25 April 2025. Many congratulations to Dr Hanlin Wu for his successful PhD viva!
  23. 23 April 2025. Many congratulations to Dr Xufeng Duan for his successful PhD viva!
  24. 22 April 2025. Our lab has a paper accepted for publication. Qiu, Z., Duan, X. & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Grammaticality representation in ChatGPT as compared to linguists and laypeople. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
  25. 13 April 2025. Our lab has a paper accepted for publication. Xu, Z., Yang, Y., Yuan, T., Feng, G., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Neural substrates associated with character amnesia in Chinese handwriting: An fNIRS study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
  26. 09 December 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted for publication. Haslett, D. A., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). How much semantic information is available in large language model tokens? Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
  27. 12 November 2024. Lab member Zhenguang Cai has a paper accepted. Riemer, M. & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Space-time interference: The asymmetry we get out is the asymmetry we put in. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
  28. 15 October 2024. Former lab member Zhuang Qiu has a paper accepted as an oral presentation at the 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, PACLIC 38 (2024), to be held on December 7-9, 2024, at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), Japan
  29. 15 October 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Duan, X., Li, S., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). MacBehaviour: An R package for behavioural experimentation on large language models. Behavior Research Methods.
  30. 26 August 2024. Lab member Xufeng presented a talk "Humanlike language use in LLMs" at CogSci Meetup at HKUST.
  31. 25 July 2024. Lab member Xufeng has a paper "The Neural Basis of Decline in Written Production: Evidence from Chinese Handwriting" accepted as a slide (oral) presentation at the annual meeting of Society for the Neurobiology of Language at Brisbane in Australia.
  32. 19 July 2024. Our lab has a book chapter accepted. Duan, X., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Chinese character processing. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics
  33. 25 June 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Wu, H., Duan, X., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Speaker demographics modulate listeners' neural correlates of spoken word processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
  34. 11 June 2024. Many congratulations to Dr David Haslett for his successful PhD viva!
  35. 10 June 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Gao, R., Lin, Y., Zhao, N., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Machine translation of Chinese classical poetry: A comparison among ChatGPT, Google Translate and DeepL Translator. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
  36. 04 June 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Haslett, D. A., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Wayward associations: When and why people think of similar-sounding words. Journal of Memory and Language.
  37. 04 April 2024. The lab held a wonderful social gathering with a roof-top barbecue; photos here.
  38. 27 February 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Xu, Z., Mittal, P. S., Ahmed, M. M., Adak, C., & Cai, Z. G. (in press). Assessing penmanship of Chinese handwriting: A deep learning-based approach. Reading and Writing.
  39. 01 February 2024. Yang, T., Cai, Z.G., Lin, W., & Wang, R. (in press). Modality-general and modality-specific control mechanisms in bilingual spoken and written productions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
  40. 01 February 2024. Many congratulations to Dr Max Dunn for his successful PhD viva!
  41. 29 January 2024. Our lab has a paper accepted. Yang, T., Cai, Z.G., Lin, W., & Wang, R. (in press). Modality-general and modality-specific control mechanisms in bilingual spoken and written productions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
  42. 23 December 2023. Our lab has a paper accepted. Cai, Z.G., & Zhao, N. (in press). Structural priming: An experimental paradigm for mapping linguistic representations. Language and Linguistics Compass.
  43. 09 December 2023. Our lab has a paper accepted. Langsford, S., Xu, Z., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Constructing a 30-item test for character amnesia in Chinese. Reading and Writing
  44. 03 December 2023. Our lab has successfully organised AMLaP Asia. Many thanks to all the lab members, without whom this conference would not have been successful. Special thanks go to Yichi, Hanlin, and Bei.
  45. 24 November 2023. Our lab has published an R package called MacBehaviour for collecting data from large language models. Well done, Xufeng and Shixuan! Duan, X., Li, S., & Cai, Z. G. (2023, November 24). MacBehaviour: An R package for behavioural experimentation on large language models. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ywtfd. LINK
  46. 23 November 2023. Our lab has a paper accepted. Thierfelder, P., Cai, Z. G., Huang, S., & Lin, H. (in press). The Chinese lexicon of deaf readers: A database of character decisions and a comparison between deaf and hearing readers. Behavior Research Methods.
  47. 23 September 2023. Dave has published a third paper - many congrats. Haslett, D.A., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Systematic mappings of sound to meaning: A theoretical review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  48. 25 June 2023. Our lab successfully organized the CogSci 2023 Hong Kong Meetup and Workshop. Many thanks to Hanlin and Shuqi for organizing the event.
  49. 22 May 2023. Our lab has its first registered report accepted. Cai, Z. G., Dunn, M. S., & Branigan. H. P. (acceptance in principle). How do speakers tailor lexical choices according to their interlocutor's accent? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
  50. 13 March 2023. Our lab member Yichi Zhang was offered a PhD position in the department. She will continue in the lab as a PhD student starting from August 2023. Many congrats to Yichi.
  51. 16 Februrary 2023. Our lab has a paper accepted. Haslett, D.A., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Similar-sounding words flesh out fuzzy meanings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Many congrats to Dave!
  52. 15 November 2022. The lab had a social gathering at the New Asian Noodle Bar. We welcomed new lab members Harvy Qiu (postdoc) and Yifei Hu (RA).
  53. 26 September 2022. Our lab has a paper accepted. Cai, Z. G., Zhao, N., Lin, H., Xu, Z., & Thierfelder, P. (in press). Syntactic encoding in written language production by deaf writers: A structural priming study and a comparison with hearing writers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
  54. 18 August 2022. Our lab was successful in obtaining an Academic Equipment Grant to purchase a combined TMS-EEG system.
  55. 30 June 2022. Our lab was successful in obtaining a GRF grant (with Z. Cai as the PI); the project title is: Neurocognitive mechanisms of character amnesia in Chinese handwriting.
  56. 04 May 2022. Our lab has a paper accepted. Cai, Z.G., Wu, L., Liu, H., & Wang, R. (in press). Cross-dimensional magnitude interactions reflect statistical correlations among physical dimensions: Evidence from space-time interaction. Acta Psychologica.
  57. 04 April 2022. Our lab was successful in obtaining a CUHK RPg Place for Development of Strategic Areas and the place will be used on Zebo Xu (currently a research assistant in the lab). Congrats to Zebo.
  58. 16 March 2022. Our lab has a paper accepted. Cai, Z.G., Zhao, N., & Pickering, M.J. (in press). How do people interpret implausible sentences? Cognition.
  59. 28 December 2021. Our lab has a paper accepted. Cai, Z.G. (in press). Interlocutor modelling in comprehending speech from interleaved interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  60. 18 November 2021.Our lab has a paper accepted. Zhao, N., Chen, X., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Planning ahead: Interpreters predict source language in consecutive interpreting. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
  61. 11 November 2021.Many congratulations to Dave for having the following paper published! Great work! Haslett, D.A., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). New neighbours make bad fences: Form-based semantic shifts in word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  62. 30 September 2021.Lab members finally had the barbecue that was long delayed from two years ago! We are also happy to see the lab expanded with the addition of Steven (as a postdoc), Tania (as a research associate), and Zebo (as a research assistant).
  63. 29 June 2021.Our lab has a new paper accepted: Cai, Z.G., Sun, Z., & Zhao, N.(in press). Interlocutor modelling in lexical alignment: The role of linguistic competence. Journal of Memory and Language.
  64. 28 June 2021.Our lab has secured a teaching grant: Virtual behavioral research for humanities and social sciences (funding source: Funding Scheme for Virtual Teaching and Learning, The Chinese University of Hong Kong).
  65. 17 May 2021.Our lab has a new paper accepted (and congratulations to Shuting and Zebo): Cai, Z.G., Huang, S., Xu, Z., & Zhao, N.(in press). Objective ages of acquisition for 3300+ simplified Chinese characters. Behavior Research Methods.
  66. 13 April 2021. Shuqi Wang, who is currently doing her MA research at Peking University, was awarded the prestigous Hong Kong PhD fellowship to do a PhD in the lab. We look forward to having her here in September.
  67. 06 April 2021. Our lab is part of a many-lab replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect, which was accepted to appear in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  68. 23 March 2021. Our lab has a new paper accepted (and congratulations to Shuting): Huang, S., Zhou, Y., Du, M., Wang, R., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). Character amnesia in Chinese handwriting: A mega-study analysis. Language Sciences.
  69. 9 February 2021. Our lab has a new paper accepted (and congratulations to Shuting): Huang, S., Lin, W., Xu, M., Wang, R., & Cai, Z.G. (in press). On the tip of the pen: Effects of character-level lexical variables and handwriter-level individual differences on orthographic retrieval difficulties in Chinese handwriting. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
  70. 24 December 2020. Our lab has a new paper accepted: Cai, Z.G., & Wang, R. (in press). Cross-dimensional magnitude interaction is modulated by representational noise: Evidence from space-time interaction. Psychological Research.
  71. 19 August 2020. Many congratulations to Xiaocong (a research asscociate in the lab), who was awarded a postdoc fellowship at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Well done!
  72. 18 August 2020. Many congratulations to Tianyi (an MA student in the lab), who has got a research assistant job at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Well done!
  73. 30 June 2020. The lab was succcessful at obtaining a GRF grant to investigate the project "Rational interlocutor modelling in language comprehension and production".
  74. 28 May 2020. Yufeng Wu, who is currently finishing his MA degree in the lab, was made, and accepted, an offer of a research assistant position at the University of Macau.
  75. 12 May 2020. Our lab has a new paper accepted: Wang, M., Cai, Z.G., Wang, R., Branigan, H.P., & Pickering, M.J. (in presss). How do phonology and orthography feedback to influence syntactic encoding in language production? Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
  76. 15 April 2020. Dave Haslett, a past MA student in the lab, was offered a Hong Kong PhD fellowship to do his PhD research in the lab. Xufeng Duan, a current MA student in the lab, was offered a studentship to do his PhD research in the lab.