She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University, concentrating on areas such as phonetics, second language acquisition, and phonology. She is interested in second language learners of Mandarin Chinese as well as English, examining the relationship between speech perception and production, influence of first language background and second language experience on sound learning, and the relative difficulty in acquiring consonants, vowels, and lexical tones. Some of her work has been published in the Journal of Phonetics and Current Issues in Chinese Linguistics. Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington