I am a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Chinese Linguistics at Lancaster University. My research centres on computational and corpus-based approaches to linguistic imitation, empathy, and social cognition. I am interested in cross-linguistic neurodiversity (Chinese is one of the languages that I focus on the most), how children acquire their first language, and how languages evolve over time. I published many peer-reviewed articles on these issues, along with the monographs "Language and Social Minds: The semantics and pragmatics of intersubjectivity" (CUP), "Dialogic resonance: Interactional imitation, categorisation and creativity" (CUP) and "Pragmatics: Theory and Methods" (OUP).