Academic Staff

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of California, Davis
• M.A. in Psychology, University of California, Davis
• M.A. in Linguistics, University of California, Davis
• M.A. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in Foreign Languages, Peking University
• B.A. in English, Chongqing University (Non EU Exchange Programme at Newcastle University, UK)

Research Interests

I study how human languages represent, process, and communicate meaning, and how these processes compare with the behaviour of large language models. My work focuses on uncertainty, pragmatic inference, grammatical knowledge, and bilingual comprehension. I combine behavioural experiments, eye tracking, psychometrics, and computational modelling, with applications to AI-supported second-language assessment and feedback.

• Psycholinguistics, sentence processing, and experimental pragmatics
• Epistemic language, uncertainty, and bilingual comprehension
• Computational linguistics, Human–LLM comparison, and language-model evaluation
• AI-supported second-language assessment and feedback

Selected Publications

• Liu, J. E., Qiu, Z., & Lin, M. Y. A. (2026). Integrating GenAI with genre-based pedagogy and the PAA model in a college writing course: Enhancing critical engagement in an AI-mediated learning ecology. Linguistics and Education, 92, 101487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2025.101487
• Qiu, Z., Duan, X., & Cai, Z. G. (2025). Grammaticality representation in ChatGPT as compared to linguists and laypeople. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 617. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04907-8
• Qiu, Z., Duan, X., & Cai, Z. (2024). Evaluating Grammatical Well-Formedness in Large Language Models: A Comparative Study with Human Judgments. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics. 189-198. https://aclanthology.org/2024.cmcl-1.16/
• Qiu, Z., Duan, X., & Cai, Z. (2023). Does ChatGPT Resemble Humans in Processing Implicatures?
• In Proceedings of the 4th Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning Workshop. Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics. 25-34. https://aclanthology.org/2023.naloma-1.3/
• Qiu, Z., & Ferreira, F. (2022). “He may certainly have forgotten”: Processing of nested epistemic expressions. Discourse Processes, 59(8), 591–618. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2022.2077064
• Ferreira, F., & Qiu, Z. (2021). Predicting syntactic structure. Brain Research, 1770, 147632. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147632