About

I am Jessica Sishi Fei, a Ph.D. student starting in 2025 in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I work with Dr. Min Wang. My research examines how readers move from identifying individual words to constructing coherent representations of text, with a particular focus on readers who use English as a second language.

Comprehension requires more than recognizing words and accessing their meanings. As a text unfolds, readers must retrieve relevant information from the preceding text and integrate each incoming word into an evolving mental representation, thereby establishing coherence across sentences. My work examines how reader-level resources and text-level cues jointly shape this process of coherence building.

I pursue this question through three complementary lines of work. The first examines the lexical foundations of comprehension, using meta-analytic structural equation modeling to test how word-level knowledge supports text-level comprehension. The second draws on behavioral and computational evidence to examine how readers integrate incoming words with prior context during online reading. The third investigates how discourse cues, such as connectives, guide the coherence relations that readers establish across sentences and how these processes extend to written production.

Looking ahead, I am interested in using computational models, including large language models, to formalize the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which readers build coherence during reading. I am also interested in exploring how these models can inform the development of adaptive, AI-supported tools for readers with diverse linguistic, cognitive, and developmental profiles. My broader goal is to translate a mechanistic understanding of reading comprehension into insights that can inform research and practice in language, literacy, and education. I am always happy to discuss these ideas and welcome opportunities for collaboration. Please feel free to reach out!