About Me

News:

2024/11/16: New paper “Pronoun interpretation is more subject-biased than expected by the Bayesian Model” is accepted at Language, Cognition and Neuroscience!

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Hi! My name is Suet-Ying Lam. I am currently a fourth-year PhD student at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Before that, I got my BA in Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). At HKU, I worked with Dr. Heeju Hwang at HKU Language Processing Lab.

My current research mainly focuses on how people use discourse information in language production. By understanding the role of discourse information, I aim to provide answers to three interrelated questions: (1) What is discourse prominence and how do it affect language production? (2) How are production choices related to production efficiency? and (3) How are production choices related to interpretation choices?

I have also spent some time on understanding the mechanism of how references are produced. You can find more details of this line of research in the Research page.

About the photo: me with lesser violetear, a type of hummingbird, in San Gerado de Dota, Costa Rica.

About how to pronounce my name: it can be roughly transcribed as [syʔ jɪŋ], or in Mandarin [ɕyə jiŋ] 雪莹. If you still find it difficult, [jɪŋ] or [jiŋ] is also fine.

Download my CV (Last updated: 2025/06/03).