She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include phonology, second language acquisition and Chinese language pedagogy. Her current research focuses on the investigation of interlanguage tonal grammars within the framework of Optimality Theory. She has published research papers in a variety of academic journals and co-authored two books on Chinese language pedagogy and Chinese linguistics. She received the Peking University Press Publication Award in the year 2012.