I am a psycholinguist who studies issues related to the learning of Chinese languages. Once upon a time, I learned and taught Mandarin as a second language, an experience that has deeply influenced my research interests. I focus on questions related to lexical tones and Chinese characters. My research uses a variety of behavioral and neurophysiological (ERP) methods.

I earned my PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, College Park. My advisor was Robert DeKeyser. I also worked closely with Ellen Lau in Linguistics.

Prior to joining PolyU, I worked at Penn State in the Center for Language Science, collaborating with Janet van Hell, Carrie Jackson, and Matthew Carlson to expand research on foreign accent and tones in new directions. I also have an ongoing collaboration with Anne Olmstead and Navin Viswanathan from the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Yuka Tatsumi examining Mandarin tone sandhi in interactive communicative contexts.

For more details, see my personal webiste: ericpelzl.com