Dr Sarah Wu

Profile

Biography

Dr Shihui (Sarah) Wu joined the Edge Hill University as a Lecturer in Psychology in 2025. She obtained her PhD in Psychology at the University of York, and subsequently held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Leicester and the University of Edinburgh.

Sarah’s research sits at the intersection of psycholinguistics and developmental psychology, with a focus on how people learn, process, and use language across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in how language development and communication are shaped by cognitive mechanisms, individual differences and social interaction.

Her particular line of research include:

• Individual differences and development: exploring how factors such as working memory, inhibition, and prior knowledge influence language comprehension and production across different developmental stages.

• Skim reading and reading goals: examining how different reading goals (e.g. skimming vs. reading for comprehension) shape eye movement control and comprehension processes.

• Social bias in language production: examining the mechanisms by which social biases are produced in language, and how these develop across childhood.

• Social communication and dialogue: examining how people use language in social interaction with others, including in human-human and human-computer communication.

Her research employs a wide range of methods and analytical approaches, including behavioural experiments, eye-tracking, and computational modelling; and has been conducted with diverse participant groups, including primary-school children, adolescents, adults, older adults, and autistic individuals.

Teaching

Sarah contributes to teaching on dissertation supervision and modules in developmental and educational psychology.