Yi Ting Huang

Yi Ting Huang is a Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland. She holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on language processing in adults and children, with applications to populations affected by poverty, cochlear implants, and pandemic-related isolation.

• Ph.D. Psychology, Harvard University, 2009
• M.A. Psychology, Harvard University, 2005
• B.A. Psychology and Economics, Northwestern University, 2003

Her work investigates the intersection of language, cognition, and social development, particularly how past experiences shape language comprehension and strategies in children from diverse backgrounds. She employs eye-tracking while listening to study real-time language processing in both literate and illiterate populations, emphasizing computational demands and learner resources like language experience and cognitive capacity.

Recent publications explore dialect differences in African American English-speaking children, auditory signal degradation effects on syntactic parsing, semantic prediction in cochlear-implant users, socioeconomic disparities in language development, and statistical learning in grammatical category acquisition. Her studies also address scalar implicatures, discourse-pragmatic interactions, and neurocognitive mechanisms in lexical processing.

• Principal Investigator, UMD Grand Challenges team project on “Fostering Inclusivity through Technology”
• Director, Maryland Language Science Center
• Co-Principal Investigator, NSF-funded Language Science Station at Planet Word Museum
• Associate Editor, Language Acquisition
• Editorial Board, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

She advises current and former graduate students, including Alix Kowalski, Rachel Adler, Zoe Ovans, and Michelle Erskine, and has taught courses such as Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Speech and Language Development in Children.