Jiayuan “Diana” Liu is a Ph.D. student in Rehabilitation Sciences at the Mass General Brigham University, where she works with Dr. Yael Arbel. Her research focuses on language development and developmental language disorder, particularly how linguistic, cognitive, neural, and social factors shape children’s communication. She is especially interested in multilingual development, multimodal communication, and behavioral and neurophysiological methods.
Diana earned an Ed.M. in Human Development and Education from Harvard University. She also holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature and a B.S. in Psychology from Peking University and studied as an exchange student at Cornell University. Her interdisciplinary training bridges language, developmental psychology, education, and communication sciences and disorders.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Diana worked in developmental language research at Harvard and remotely with UCLA. At Harvard’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies, she supported studies with infants, young children, and families and coded naturalistic language, gesture, symbolic understanding, and play. With UCLA’s Language and Literacy Research Group, she analyzed classroom language input and output, code-switching, gestures, multimodality, and technology use, including interactions involving neurodivergent students. She also developed annotation manuals to standardize research workflows. Through her doctoral training, Diana hopes to integrate developmental science, cognitive neuroscience, and clinically relevant research to better understand and support children with diverse language and communication needs.
- BA, English Language and Literature, Peking University, Beijing, China
- BS, Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China
- EdM, Human Development and Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
- Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)
- Language and Literacy Development
- Multilingualism
- Cognitive Neuroscience