I am an early-career researcher in language science and a Qiushi Postdoctoral Fellow at Zhejiang University. I study how people understand and produce language in real time. Much of my work focuses on Mandarin Chinese, while also asking how second language learning, multilingual experience, and crosslinguistic variation shape real-time processing.

My research asks how the mind builds sentence structure in real time, rapidly combining word order, syntactic constraints, semantic plausibility, prosody, and contextual expectations. These cues are weighted differently across languages and may also be used differently by native speakers, second language learners, and bilinguals. I use EEG, behavioral experiments, and acoustic analysis to study how language experience shapes these processes in comprehension and production. I am especially interested in what unfolds at the millisecond level during incremental sentence processing. As one of the most complex feats of human cognition, language can teach us how the brain uses structure, manages multiple levels of information, and adapts through learning.

I came to this work partly through my own long and sometimes humbling experience of learning and living in languages beyond my native English. My training has taken me from the US to Spain, Canada, and China, and I remain strongly committed to open and international science.

You can contact me at max.wolpert [at] zju [dot] edu [dot] cn.

Language is not processed all at once. As we listen, read, or speak, we continuously build structure from partial information.

My research asks how this process unfolds in real time. I study how people make sense of sentence structure, how learning and using more than one language changes comprehension and production, and how timing in speech helps speakers organize language and coordinate with others.