Rate My Professor Xin Wang

Xin Wang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. A native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, she completed her BA in English at Beijing Language and Culture University, followed by an MA in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Psycholinguistics at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Professor Ken Forster, with a thesis titled The Bilingual Lexicon. Prior to her appointment at Macquarie University, she held academic positions in Singapore and the United Kingdom. She is affiliated with the Macquarie University Centre for Reading and the Lifespan Health and Wellbeing Research Centre.

Wang's research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics explores how language is processed, represented, and controlled in the bilingual mind and brain, at the intersection of language, cognition, and bilingualism. Her contributions advance theoretical models of bilingual lexical access and cross-language processing. Using methodologies such as masked priming, eye-tracking, and EEG/MEG, she captures cross-language processing with millisecond precision, showing that bilingual language processing is automatic, parallel, and interactive at phonological, morphological, and semantic levels across spoken and visual word recognition. Her interests encompass lexical access and retrieval, bilingualism, multilingualism, second language processes, spoken word recognition, cross-language activation including lexical tones, and language control during bilingual production. She leads the Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Lab at Macquarie University, mentoring PhD students, research interns, research assistants, and international visitors from institutions in China and elsewhere.

Key publications include 'Language dominance, educational context, and the trilingual lexicon: a large-scale masked translation priming study' (International Journal of Multilingualism, 2025), 'Language selective or non-selective in bilingual lexical access? It depends on lexical tones!' (PLoS ONE, 2020), 'Do you hear ‘feather’ when listening to ‘rain’? Lexical tone activation during unconscious translation: evidence from Mandarin-English bilinguals' (Cognition, 2017), 'Masked translation priming with semantic categorization: testing the sense model' (Bilingualism, 2010), and 'Language dominance in translation priming: evidence from balanced and unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals' (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2013). Wang serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (since 2026), PLOS One (Academic Editor since 2025), Frontiers in Education (Guest Associate Editor since 2023), and Instructed Second Language Acquisition (since 2022). She has delivered invited talks including 'Lexical Activation and Competition in Bilingualism' and 'Lexical Tone in Spoken Word Recognition' in 2026.