Developmental Psychology

PSY 101 - Introductory Psychology
PSY 300 - Research Methods in Psychology

Understanding the acquisition and development of early language and literacy skills among
neurotypical (NT) children and children with ASD is central to my research. Specifically, I
studied language (vocabulary and sentence) and literacy (reading and writing) development and
effective interventions to enhance communication and language abilities of young children, as
well as the reciprocal relationship between early literacy and cognitive development. Grounded
in an applied developmental science perspective, my program of research includes three
interrelated goals: 1) examine the reciprocal relations between early literacy acquisition and
executive function development; 2) explore the heterogeneity of language and literacy abilities
among children with autism and design more individualized literacy instruction protocols for
different reading profiles; and 3) characterize and examine the expressive language
development using large-scale data in children with ASD. My future research will explore how
family and school environment and interaction influence the language and literacy learning of
children in early years, and what we can do to make language learning easier for children with
exceptional needs.

Long, B., Wang, Y., Christie, S., Frank, M. C., & Fan, J. E. (2023). Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a US and Chinese sample. Developmental Psychology, 59(10), 1784. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001600

Liu, J., *, Wang, Y. & Yi, L. (2023). Heterogeneity and imbalance of reading profiles in autism spectrum disorder. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2022.102088

Liu, Y., * Chee, J. H., & Wang, Y. (2022). Parental burnout and resilience intervention among Chinese parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontier in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1034520

Wang, Y., Lan, Z., Duan, I., Peng, P., Wang, W., & Wang, T. (2022). A meta-analysis on the cognitive and linguistic correlates of reading skills among children with ASD. Reading and Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10338-7.

Lau, C., Wang, Y., Chan, S. W., Chen, E. E., McBride, C., Tse, S. K., ... & Rao, N. (2020). Promoting Chinese literacy in south Asian preschoolers and their mothers in Hong Kong: an intervention study. Early Education and Development, 31(4), 561-581. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2019.1690341.

McBride, C., Wang, Y., & Cheang, L. M. L. (2018). Dyslexia in Chinese. Current Developmental Disorders Reports, 5(4), 217-225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40474-018-0149-y.

Wang, Y., McBride, C., Zhou, Y., Malatesha Joshi, R., & Farver, J. A. M. (2018). Becoming literate in Chinese: a comparison of native-speaking and non-native‐speaking children. Journal of Research in Reading, 41(3), 511-524. http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12122.

Zhou, Y., McBride, C., Leung, J. S. M., Wang, Y., Joshi, M., & Farver, J. (2018). Chinese and English reading-related skills in L1 and L2 Chinese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience,33(3): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1342848.