Jie Ren

Contact Details

Brown University - Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences Dept. - Providence, RI - 02912 - USA
Office : MRL102D
Phone : + 1 401-863-1528
email : Jie_Ren@brown.edu

Download Full CV

Profile
My research looks at the contribution of both nature and nurture in language development. Concerning nature, my research interest lies in how the psychological reality of phonological universals and their contributions to infant speech perception. These series of studies are intended to shed light on the basic questions of generative grammar:

• What constitutes phonological universals?
• How does phonological universal contribute to language acquisition?
• How does phonological universals facilitate infant speech processing?

Concerning nurture, my research interest lies in how detailed phonological knowledge in a specific language acquired by young infants and how phonological details contribute to infants’ lexical representation and word recognition. This series of study mainly investigate the following questions:

• Whether young toddlers represent word with detailed phonological contrasts?
• Whether such detailed representation will be used in their word recognition process?
• Whether such detailed representation is consistent with the representation of adults?
• What model will be best to account for the graded lexical representation?

Scholarship: Graduate Fellowship
Supervisor: Professor James L. Morgan
External Memberships

• Linguistic Society of China (LSC)

Selected Publications
Conference Presentations, Colloquia, and other presentations

• Ren Jie & Gao Liqun (2008). Phonological Grammar is Categorical and Gradient. The International Symposium of Phonetic Frontiers, April 2008, Beijing.
• Ren Jie & Gao Liqun (2008). Syntax is Free from Phonology--The Prosodic-driven PF Movement Hypothesis. The 12th Symposium on Contemporary Linguistics, October 2008, Wuhan.
• Ren Jie & Gao Liqun (2008). On Stress Assignment Algorithms of Mandarin Disyllabic Compound Words. The 7th Pan-Asiatic International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, December 2008, Guangzhou.