Dr. Caicai Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies and Director of the Neurocognition of Language, Music and Learning Lab. She is also a member of the Research Centre for Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, and an affiliated member of the Speech Therapy Unit.

Her work broadly concentrates on how language is processed and represented in the human brain, and how it interacts with other cognitive domains such as music and memory. At a more specific level, her research focuses on: (1) the relationship of language, music and brain, investigated from the perspective of how congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness), an innate musical pitch disorder, affects speech processing from behavioral to neural levels; (2) how sleep contributes to the consolidation of speech sound categories in the brain of L2 learners; and (3) the neurocognitive mechanisms of learning and memory problems in children with developmental disorders of speech and language. She uses a broad range of tools including behavioral methods, electroencephalograph (EEG) and functional MRI (fMRI) to study these questions. She is currently an Associate Editor/Academic Editor for Scientific Reports, PLOS ONE, and Frontiers in Psychology.

Neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, learning and memory, developmental disorders of language, phonetics, lexical tone, music