Xinyan Kou is a PhD student in Language, Discourse & Communication in the School of Education, Communication & Society, under the supervision of Dr Jill Hohenstein (primary) and Prof. Gabriella Rundblad (secondary).

Xinyan’s main research interests include linguistic relativity, language typology, and cognitive semantics, particularly in relation to events involving realisation.

Under the general framework of Talmyan event integration theory, her current doctoral project is focused on a verb property called ‘fulfillment type’, which measures verbs' capacity to express goal realisation. Through a combination of theoretical investigations and psycholinguistic experiments, Xinyan aims to explore how this property can be diagnosed using linguistic tests, how it is perceived conceptually, and how it influences cognition.