Fang Jackson-Yang

Teaching Fellow in Language Education

  • Institute for Language Education (ILE)
  • Moray House School of Education and Sport

Contact details

Address

Street

Charteris Land 4.06
Moray House School of Education and Sport
University of Edinburgh (Holyrood Campus)

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 8AQ

Biography

Background

I am a psycholinguist, linguist and language educator. I was born and grew up in central China. I worked as a Chinese-as-a-second-language teacher and a national radio reporter before starting my career in academia in the UK. Currently, I am a Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Language Education (ILE), Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh.

Postgraduate teaching

 Language and the Learner

 Second Language Teaching Curriculum

 Language Awareness for Second Language Teachers 

 Conceptualising research: Foundations, assumptions and praxis

 Dissertation (MSc Language Education; MSc TESOL; MSc Language and Intercultural Communication)

Statistics Teaching at CDCS, Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)

 Mixed-Effects Modeling Using R

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Research summary

I research psycholinguistics, focusing on how people track referent activation in each other’s mental representations and how they achieve conceptual alignment across various language tasks.

Current research interests

Transitive action events such as “the boy hammering the coke can flat” occur in daily conversations often. Descriptions of such events often convey meaning about not only what happens in the event but also which event element is prominent in the speaker’s mental model such that they intend to direct their addressee’s attention to. For example, your attention may be drawn to the boy, the coke can, or the consequence of the event (the state change of the can), depending on how the speaker packages information in the sentence. Correctly indicating and understanding prominent event elements is an important part of communication and cognition. How do people do this? In particular, I am interested in how speakers encode and hearers decode conceptually prominent elements in transitive sentences in monologues and simulated dialogues. I design psycholinguistic experiments using factorial design that allow me to manipulate the prominence state of a particular event element and investigate how such manipulation influences people’ linguistic choices in sentences that they produce and their eye movement patterns during comprehension. My research contributes to the development of more sophisticated theories of language mediated attention and has practical implications for language use in everyday life.

Affiliated research centres

Conference details

  • Poster “Mandarin speakers use a dynamic content-structure dual system to encode the relative activation of competing event roles during discourse development”. The 11th Biennial Experimental Pragmatics Conference (XPRAG 2025), 17-19 Sep 2025, University of Cambridge, UK.
  • Poster “The Preposition BA shapes interpretation (but not prediction) of upcoming entities in Mandarin comprehension”. 29th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2022), BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 31 Aug – 2 Sept 2023, Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain.
  • Poster “Speakers’ discourse expectations for the prominence status of entities in action events”, 28th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2022), University of York, 7-9 Sep 2022, England, the UK.
  • Talk “The dynamic prominence status of thematic roles in simulated Mandarin conversations (with a focus on grammatical encoding)”, the 28th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-28), Chinese University of Hong Kong, 20-22 May 2022, Hong Kong, China.
  • Short talk “The dynamic prominence status of Patient in Mandarin sentence production (with a focus on message encoding)”, 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Pennsylvania, 5 March 2021, Philadelphia, USA.
  • Talk “Pinning down prominence relations in action events: Evidence from Mandarin sentence production”, 2nd International Conference “Prominence in Language 2018”, University of Cologne, 11-13 July 2018, Cologne, Germany.
  • Talk “Is topicalised topic more prominent than left-dislocated topic? – Evidence from Mandarin sentence production”, the 1st International Workshop on the interface of Information Structure and Argument Structure (InfoStars), University of Seville, 25-27 Oct 2017, Seville, Spain.
  • Poster “How do speakers grammatically encode conceptually prominent information?”, the 23rd AMLaP conference: Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing, 7-9 Sep, 2017, Lancaster, the UK.
  • Talk “The persistence of prominence in production: Evidence from spoken Mandarin Chinese”, Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives (DETEC 2017), Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,  26-27 June 2017, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
  • Invited Talk: “The persistence of linguistic prominence in language production: Evidence from spoken Mandarin Chinese”, departmental lab meeting at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI)’s 75th Anniversary Event, the University of Geneva, 28-30 Sep 2016, Switzerland.
  • Poster: “Corpus-based study on topic-comment realisation in spoken Mandarin Chinese”, Prosody and Information Structure in Stuttgart (PINS 2016), 23-24 March 2016, Stuttgart, Germany.

Invited speaker

27-28 Oct 2022.  "Predictive processing of Mandarin state-change transitive events using morphosyntactic cues".  AttLis-2022 The Attentive Listener in the Visual World. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT.  https://slac.uconn.edu/attlis-2022/

Academic review

Dec 2023. Discourse Processes

Nov 2023. Linguistic Inquiry

June 2019. Conference "Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental, and Computational perspectives" (DETEC2019), Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany.

Organiser

The 30th AMLaP (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing) 2024, Edinburgh, UK

Manchester Forum in Linguistics (mFiL) 2013, Manchester, UK

Papers delivered

  • Yang, F., Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (2025). BA and object state changes: Unspecific morphosyntactic cues shape Mandarin discourse comprehension. Discourse Processes, 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2025.2500270.

  • Fukumura, K., & Yang, F. (2024). Interactive structure building in sentence production, Cognitive Psychology (148). 101616, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2023.101616.
  • Banegas, D. L., Budzenski, M. & Yang, F. (2024). Enhancing pre-service teachers’ projective agency for diverse and multilingual classrooms through a course on curriculum development, International Multilingual Research Journal, https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2024.2318967.
  • Corps, R. E., Yang, F., & Pickering, M. J. (2023). Evidence against egocentric prediction during language comprehension. Royal Society Open Science.10231252231252. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231252.
  • Yang, F. (2012). “Speech Error Correction from the Perspective of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language”, in Huang, D. & Xing, M. (eds). Applied Chinese Language Studies III: Innovations in teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language. pp. 221-230, London: Sinolingua London Ltd. https://www.bclts.org.uk/onewebmedia/Applied%20Chinese%20Language%2
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