Di Liu

di
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Experimental Psychology

I was a research assistant at ReadOxford in 2022, when I was a visiting student at Oxford. My research interest falls widely in the cognitive and developmental field. Here, I mainly helped with Rainy’s project about how children learn about emotional words. I am starting my PhD at John Hopkins University in fall 2023.

Reading has always been super attractive to me since I was a kid and it influenced me magically. The beautiful and romantic fairy tales encouraged me to observe the world around me more carefully, and the terse lines fascinated me with the elegance of language. ReadOxford offered me a chance to systematically explore the interaction between reading and its miraculous effect. Back at my home institution Beijing Normal University, I have led projects concerning how people organize their verbal knowledge of emotion. Moving forward, I found it interesting to study how we acquire these emotional words in the very first place – and this idea brought Rainy and me together as collaborators!

My favourite word

One word that comes to my mind is “masquerade”. I can’t actually explain the reason behind it, but I find it very graceful. Its pronunciation is a little bit exotic and the letter ‘q’ makes the whole word looks elegant in writing. When I started working on my first English sci-fi in junior high, I even used this word as the name of a mysterious project in my story on purpose.

My favourite childhood book

The book that impressed me the most is called Because of Winn-Dixie. It is about a lonely girl moving to a new place with her dad – who is busy all the time – and adopting a big dog that somehow became the key to her new friendship with ‘eccentrics’ in town. I enjoyed reading about this peaceful adventure about making friends with strangers and finding love in the trivial life.