Her research focuses on early phonological and lexical development in monolingual and bilingual learners and on the perception and integration of lexical tones in infancy and early childhood. She has been awarded competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (USA) as well as the Ministry of Education (Singapore) for her research on early language development. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Science from Brown University and served on the faculty at Boston University for nine years prior to moving to the National University of Singapore in 2010.