The Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program likes to spotlight the current work of people in the Program and what brought them to that line of work. Today we feature SLS Graduate student Bronson Hui!

My name is Bronson Hui, born and raised in colonial Hong Kong. I am currently a PhD candidate in the Second Language Studies (SLS) program and a graduate statistical consultant at our statistical center (CSTAT). I joined the SLS program in Fall 2017 with an MSc in Applied Linguistics and SLA from Oxford and a BA & BEd from the University of Hong Kong. I was a high school EFL teacher in the city for seven years prior to my doctoral training.

To SLA researchers, I may be a statistician and a quantitative methodologist. To statisticians, I am a language researcher or more specifically an applied psycholinguist. I am interested in the development of lexical processing skills (e.g., Hui, 2020) and its implication on language use (e.g., Hui & Godfroid, 2020). I also have a couple of projects investigating reading-while-listening comprehension (e.g., Hui & Godfroid, in-principle acceptance) and the efficacy of reading aloud listening items to young learners (Hui et al., in prep.). Given my current graduate assistantship, I have the opportunity to work with faculty members and graduate students across campus on their exciting projects, offering consulting services on research design, data management and analysis. This work has got me even more into statistics and its proper use in applied contexts (e.g., Hui, 2019). I am also an advocate for open science practices (e.g., Hui & Huntley, forthcoming). Finally, I have had the great honor to be funded by various grant programs such as the Language Learning Dissertation Grant and the TOEFL: Young Students Graduate Student Research Grant.

This year, I am prioritizing my dissertation research which aims to investigate the extent to which there is an implicit aspect of word knowledge. Can reaction time and psycholinguistic-based vocabulary measures tell us more about one’s lexical proficiency than traditional paper-based tests? I will administer two conventional vocabulary tests and three reaction time tasks to see if the results will pattern with each other, addressing the fundamental question of what it means to know a word in vocabulary research.

My website contains more information about my work.