Erli Tang

Erli Tang was born and raised in Shanghai, China. Before joining the ANLI program at the University of Arizona, she attended Pennsylvania State University, where she earned her dual BAs with honors in Linguistics and Japanese. She later completed her MA in Computational Linguistics at San Francisco State University. Erli's undergraduate honors thesis, funded by the NSF, investigated the influence of Mandarin on the Shanghainese sound system. She also explored the correlation between the construction of a sense of belonging and linguistic features among Chinese international students in the U.S. in her master's thesis. Her prior research experience fuels her current interest in further exploring the interplay between identity construction and linguistic features among diasporic communities in the U.S., using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Outside of academics, Erli enjoys working out, ballet, hiking, reading extensively on poetry and clinical psychology, creative writing, and photography.