معرفی
Kaidi Chen is a Lecturer in Chinese at Columbia University's Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, where he joined as a full-time faculty member in fall 2022. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of speech science, psycholinguistics, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy.
His educational background includes:
- PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Connecticut
- Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science from the University of Connecticut
Chen's research interests include Phonetics and Speech Science, Psycholinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, Language Pedagogy, Open Science and Reproducible Research Practices, and Data Visualization and Statistical Analysis. As a phonetician and experimental linguist, he investigates the interplay between bottom-up acoustic-phonetic cues and top-down semantic cues in spoken word recognition, with a focus on individual differences in both native and non-native speech. His methodological toolkit encompasses behavioral experiments, survey methodology, and computational modeling, with extensive use of R for data visualization and statistical analysis.
His scientific awards and grants include:
- Dissertation Grant (ranked among the very best) from Language Learning
- Dissertation Writing Support Grant from the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (NFMLTA) and the Modern Language Journal (MLJ)
- Graduate Research Support Grant from the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association (NFMLTA) and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL)
- Jiede Empirical Research Grant from the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) USA
- Collaborative Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Chen is an experienced language educator dedicated to pedagogical innovation. He has taught all levels of Chinese language and culture, as well as domain-specific courses such as Contemporary Chinese Film and Business Chinese, at institutions including Allegheny College, Trinity College, and Middlebury College. He is a core collaborator on the NEH-funded project "An Engaging Digital Curriculum for Intermediate Chinese Language and Culture", focusing on intercultural communicative competence. Additionally, he contributed to the teacher's handbook for Integrated Chinese and co-authored the "Snapshots: Mini-Stories for Beginning Chinese" series to provide extended reading materials.
During his doctoral training, Chen was a Predoctoral Research Trainee at the Spoken Language Processing (SlaP) Lab, which is affiliated with the Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Haskins Laboratories.
