Dr Fang Liu (PI)
Fang Liu is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading. She received her PhD in Linguistics and MS in Statistics from the University of Chicago. Her research aims to understand how the human brain processes pitch information for linguistic and musical purposes during production and perception. Her current areas of research include speech prosody in tone versus non-tonal languages, pitch processing in different populations (autism, amusia, dyslexia, musicianship), speech/music production and perception, and cognitive and neural bases of pitch processing.
Professor Cunmei Jiang (Co-I)
Cunmei Jiang is a Professor of Musicology in the Music College at Shanghai Normal University, China. She received her PhD in Musicology from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 2005. She then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Jiang has a wide variety of research interests, including music psychology, music performance, and Mozart piano music. Her current research focuses on congenital amusia, comparison between music and speech processing, music emotion, and therapeutic effects of music on speech disorders (particularly on aphasia and autism).
Jiayin Li
Jiayin Li is a PhD student at the University of Reading. She received a BA and an MA in Linguistics from Harbin Institute of Technology (China) and an MSc in Language Sciences (Neuroscience, Language & Communication) from University College London. She is currently in her 1st year of the PhD program working under Dr. Fang Liu’s supervision where her research focuses on speech-in-noise processing in autism. Her PhD is supported by a SeNSS PhD studentship with Dr. Ian Cunnings as her 2nd supervisor.