Tao is a 3rd-year PhD student in psycholinguistics at the University of Auckland, where he works with Dr. Norbert Vanek and Dr. Rebecca Defina.

He earned a B.A. in English and law and an M.A. in foreign languages and literature from Beijing Institute of Technology, where he began his exploration of language and cognition with Dr. Yue Ji.

Tao is interested in exploring how language, cognition, and society interact in the world around us. His current research focuses on how children and adults from different language backgrounds perceive and describe daily events. Beyond studying events, he is also interested in how language and cognition evolve within changing social contexts.

Outside of academics, Tao is working on becoming a gym beast and hopes to try as many restaurants around the world as possible.

You can reach him via email: [email protected]

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Mar 26, 2026

Xiaotao Liu is presenting one poster featuring joint work with Norbert Vanek: "Language-modulated event segmentation examined through interruption detection and boundary tapping" at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at MIT

Xiaotao Liu (刘晓涛)

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