Hui-wen Cheng joins GMU Linguistics faculty for 2013-2014


Hui-wen in the desertHui-wen received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from Boston University. Before she joined GMU, she completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Linguistics and the Second Language Teaching and Research Center at University of Utah. Psycholinguistics and second language acquisition have been her passion for research. She is particularly interested in studying the cognitive processes of reading and the representation of the mental lexicon. Her reading research concerns two topics. One topic is how L1 literacy experience influences L2 reading development. The other topic is the similarities and differences in reading alphabetic orthographies (e.g., English) versus non-alphabetic orthographies (e.g., Chinese). Her study on the L1 and L2 mental lexicon explores forward transfer (i.e. the influence of L1 on the L2 mental lexicon) as well as backward transfer (i.e. the influence of L2 on the L1 mental lexicon).