Professor Yu is the director of the Phonology Laboratory and the principal investigator of the Washo Documentation Project. His research and teaching interests include theoretical and experimental phonology, the interface between phonology and morphology, as well as issues concerning language variation and change, particularly in relation to the inception of sound change and its phonologization. His language areas of focus are North America and Asia.

Professor Xiang's research is geared towards better understanding the processing and neural mechanisms that support the rapid, real-time construction of sophisticated linguistic representations.  She primarily works on sentence processing, including syntax, semantics, and discourse comprehension.