Chien-Jer Charles Lin

Phone:

(812) 855-5180

Email:

chiclin@iu.edu

Charles Lin is Professor of Chinese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Adjunct Professor in the Cognitive Science Program and the Department of Linguistics. He directs the Language and Cognition Lab, where he investigates the nature of grammar and how it operates both in the mind and in society.

His research examines linguistic behavior through experimental, corpus-based, and computational approaches. His lab is equipped to conduct behavioral studies (including response-time and eye-tracking experiments) as well as neurolinguistic research using electroencephalography (EEG). In addition to his longstanding work on sentence processing, his recent research has expanded to explore the relationship between language and thought. He explores questions about multilingualism such as: How do the languages we use shape the ways we conceptualize the world, reason about it, and engage in social interactions? Do we think differently because of the languages we use?

Websites

• Language and Cognition Laboratory
• Personal Website

Research Interests

• Chinese linguistics
• Sentence and discourse processing
• East Asian psycholinguistics
• Experimental linguistics, corpus linguistics
• Linguistic anthropology

Education

PhD, University of Arizona, 2006

Courses Recently Taught

• Bubble Tea versus Bubble Gum: Languages and Cultures of East Asia and the World (EALC E204)
• Chinese Language and Culture (EALC E301/505)
• Psychology of Chinese (EALC E350/505)
• Introduction to Chinese Linguistics (EALC C421/520)
• Linguistic and Processing Issues in Translation (EALC C600)
• Graduate Seminars (EALC E600) on: Sentence Processing; East Asian Psycholinguistics; Processing and Acquisition of Tones and Prosody; Experimental Chinese Linguistics; Experimental Linguistics of East Asian Languages; Linguistic Issues in Translation; Social and Cognitive Aspects of Language Processing; Chinese Language, Culture, and Cognition.

Awards and Distinctions

• Dr. James Mumford Teaching Excellence for Empowering Students Award, April 2025
• Uehara Distinguished Service Award, Indiana University, April 2022
• Trustees’ Teaching Award, Indiana University, May 2016
• Young Scholar Award on Interdisciplinary Research from the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL), May 2010
• International Young Scholar Award, PACLIC-19, 2005
• Dissertation Scholarship, Ministry of Education, TAIWAN, 2005-2006
• Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship for Scholarly Exchange, 2001-2003
• Chao Yuan-Ren Foundation Scholarship, 2001

Publication Highlights

• Namboodiripad, S., et al. (2026). Finding our ROLE: How and why to reframe essentialist approaches to language. Cognition, 271, 106444.
• Liu, Zeping, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2026). Plausibility leads to better comprehension but not syntactic adaptation: Evidence from structural disambiguation in Chinese. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 79, 22-41.https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218251332420
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, He Zhou, and Hai Hu. (2026). Thinking differently in Chinese and English: The role of grammar in translational thinking. In D. Moser (ed.). Thinking in Chinese and English: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Whorfian Question (pp. 99-112). Springer Nature: Singapore.
• Gao, Feier, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2025). Incorporating frequency effects in the lexical access for Mandarin tone 3 sandhi. Language and Speech 68, 204–228. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309241260062
• Hu, Hai, Aini Li, Yina Patterson, Jiahui Huang, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2025). Bilingual influences and sources of variability in acceptability judgments: A case study of Chinese. Lingua 318, 103911. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103911
• Liu, Zeping, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2025). Grammar in syntactic adaptations of Chinese: The state of the art. In Shou-hsin Teng, Li-ping Chang, & Te-hsin Liu (eds.) Handbook of Chinese Language Learning and Technology (pp. 251-279). Springer Nature. (ISBN-10: ‎9819759293)
• Xiao Dong, Fengming Liu, Chien-Jer Charles Lin, Monica Nesbitt, & Shuju Shi. (2025). Neutral Tone Variation in Beijing Mandarin: Is Neutral Tone Toneless?Proceedings of the 25th INTERSPEECH Conference. (10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1173)
• Liu, Fengming & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2024). Relative clause attachments in Mandarin Chinese: Insights from classifier-noun agreement. Frontiers in Language Sciences. Section Psycholinguistics. Volume 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2024.1438323
• Lyu, Siqi, Jung-Yueh Tu, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2024). Structural position affects topic transition: An eye-tracking study. Language and Linguistics, 25(1), 56–79. https://benjamins.com/catalog/lali.00149.lyu
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, and Hai Hu. (2023). Linking comprehension and production: Frequency distribution of Chinese relative clauses in the Sinica Treebank. In Chu-Ren Huang, Shukai Hsieh, & Peng Jin (eds.) Chinese Language Resources: Data Collection, Linguistic Analysis, Annotation and Language Processing (pp. 419-442). Springer, Cham, Switzerland.
• Hu, Hai, Ziying Zhang, Weifang Huang, Jackie Yan-ki Lai, Aini Li, Yina Patterson, Jiahui Huang, Peng Zhang, Chien-Jer Charles Lin, & Rui Wang. (2023). Revisiting acceptability judgements: CoLAC--Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability in Chinese. ArXiv, abs/2305.14091.
• Tian, Zuoyu, Xiao Dong, Feier Gao, Haining Wang, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2022). Mandarin tone sandhi realization: Evidence from large speech corpora. Proceedings of the 23rd INTERSPEECH Conference. (ISCA Speech Archive: https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2022/tian22e_interspeech.pdf)
• Yao, Yao, Zhiguo Xie, Chien-Jer Charles Lin, & Chu-Ren Huang. (2022). Grammatical acceptability in Mandarin Chinese. In Chu-Ren Huang, Yen-Hwei Lin, I-Hsuan Chen, & Yu-Yin Hsu (eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (pp. 669-706). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2021). Psycholinguistics. In James Stanlaw (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. John Wiley & Sons. (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0328)
• Gao, Feier, Siqi Lyu, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2021). Processing Mandarin tone 3 sandhi at the morphosyntactic interface: Reduplication and lexical compounds. Frontiers in Psychology. 12: 713665. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713665 (doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713665)
• Lyu, Siqi, Tu, Jung-Yueh, and Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2020). Processing plausibility in concessive and causal relations: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking. Discourse Processes57, 320-342. DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2019.1680089
• Hu, Hai, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Sandra Kübler, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2020). Building a literary treebank for translation studies in Chinese. Proceedings of 19th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT). pp.18-31. (Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology: https://aclanthology.org/2020.tlt-1.2/)
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2018). Subject prominence and processing filler-gap dependencies in prenominal relative clauses: The comprehension of possessive relative clauses and adjunct relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Language94, 758-797. 
• Jaeger, Lena, Chen, Zhong, Li, Qiang, Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Vasishth, Shravan. (2015). The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing. Journal of Memory and Language79-80, 97-120. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005)
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Ahrens, Kathleen. (2010). Ambiguity advantage revisited: Two meanings are better than one when accessing Chinese Nouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 39,1-19.
• Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2008). The processing foundation of head-final relative clauses. Language and Linguistics 9, 813-38.