Ruochen Niu is currently an Assistant Professor and Master's Advisor at Institute of Quantitative Linguistics, Beijing Language and Culture University. She holds a Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang University, and conducts interdisciplinary research spanning quantitative linguistics, dependency grammar and computational cognitive science. 

Ruochen's research adopts quantitative methods against corpus to investigate the structural complexities of human languages across different linguistic levels, as well as the underlying cognitive and functional mechanisms that shape these complexities. Her work has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, both domestically and internationally. For further details about her research, please visit her ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ruochen-Niu

Ruochen begins to take master's students from September 2025 (Major: Linguistics and Applied Linguistics). Students with basic programming skills and an interest in language research at the digital era are welcome to join. E-mail: niuruochen@blcu.edu.cn. 

Research Articles & Book Chapters

（*corresponding author）

[1]     Xie, Yonghui, Niu, Ruochen & Liu, Haitao*. 2025. Cognitive motivations behind absent objects in passive sentences across Chinese and English. Review of Cognitive Linguistics (Accepted). (SSCI, AHCI)

[2]     Shen, Mengfei, Niu, Ruochen* & Liu, Haitao*. 2025. Cumulative coverage of Chinese L2 textbooks: How well do they prepare students for reading real-world texts? Language, Culture and Curriculum (Online). https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2528779. (SSCI, AHCI)

[3]     Niu, Ruochen & Liu, Haitao*. 2024. Factors influencing dependency distance. An account of the MDD variation between Chinese and English. In Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency, pp. 276-296. Cambridge University Press.

[4]     Xie, Yonghui, Niu, Ruochen* & Liu, Haitao*. 2024. A corpus-based study on semantic and cognitive features of bei sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (Online). https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0031. (SSCI, AHCI)

[5]     Shen, Mengfei, & Niu, Ruochen*. 2024. Quantitative Studies on Vocabulary and Syntax (in Chinese): edited by Wei Huang et al. Hangzhou, Zhejiang University Press, 2022, 383 pp., ¥88.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-7-308-22682-0. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 31(2), 165–176. (SSCI, AHCI)

[6]     Niu, Ruochen, Wang, Yaqin* & Liu, Haitao. 2023. The Cross-linguistic Variations in Dependency Distance Minimization and its Potential Explanations. In Proceedings of the 37th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pp. 559–569. ACL Anthology.

[7]     Xie, Yonghui, Niu, Ruochen*, & Liu, Haitao. 2023. Contrasting the Chinese bei-passive and the English be-passive through dependency distance. In Proceedings of the 37th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pp. 406–415. ACL Anthology.

[8]     Niu, Ruochen & Liu, Haitao*. 2022. Effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing. An investigation based on a psycholinguistic treebank of English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 51(5), 1043-1062. (SSCI)

[9]     牛若晨，王雅琴*. 两种依存方向的处理难度是一样的吗？——基于英语树库的计算认知研究。《词汇与句法计量研究》，杭州：浙江大学出版社，201-210页，2022年。

[10]  Niu, Ruochen, Wang, Yaqin & Liu, Haitao*. 2021. The properties of rare and complex syntactic constructions in English: A corpus-based comparative study. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021), pp. 74-83. ACL Anthology.

[11]  Niu, Ruochen & Osborne, Timothy*. 2019. Chunks are components: A dependency grammar approach to the syntactic structure of Mandarin. Lingua, 224(6), 60-83. (SSCI, AHCI)

[12]  Niu, Ruochen. 2017. Chinese descriptive and resultative V-de constructions: A dependency-based analysis. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), pp. 154-164. ACL Anthology.

[13]  Osborne, Timothy & Niu, Ruochen. 2017. The component unit: Introducing a novel unit of syntactic analysis. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), pp. 165-175. ACL Anthology.