Mo Lei

Introduction

Mo Lei (莫雷, born 1951) turned a provincial normal college into one of the strongest psychology programs in China, and gave the field a theory to argue about on the way. Admitted to South China Normal University through the first post-Cultural-Revolution gaokao, he became the university's first doctoral student and then, at forty-two, its youngest full professor — rising to lead the psychology department, the university's research vice presidency, and the Ministry of Education key research base for psychological application. His science asks how Chinese readers actually process text, and his answer — the dual-process theory of Chinese reading, integrating a hundred papers of his own experimental work — holds that skilled reading runs on two coordinated systems rather than one. His laboratory also produced, in a 2010 PNAS paper with Kay and Tan, a striking language-relativity result: newly trained lexical categories shift color perception, and the shift shows up in the brain's two hemispheres differently.

Early Life and Education

Mo was born in 1951 (in Gaozhou, Guangdong, by most accounts). The restored 1977 gaokao took him into South China Normal University; in 1981 he entered its psychology master's program with the highest admission score in the university, and in 1985 he became the first doctoral student in SCNU's history, completing his PhD in developmental and educational psychology in 1988 — among the first education-psychology doctorates trained in the People's Republic.

Academic and Professional Career

He joined SCNU's faculty on finishing the doctorate, was promoted directly to full professor in 1993, and led its psychology department, its deanery of educational science, and (as vice president) its research administration, while directing the Center for Studies of Psychological Application — a Ministry of Education key research base. Under his academic leadership SCNU's developmental and educational psychology became a national key discipline, and in the 2017 national discipline evaluation SCNU's psychology tied for first in China with Peking University and Beijing Normal University. His honors include the national Teaching Master title, Ministry of Education research achievement first prizes, and the Chinese Psychological Society's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The dual-process theory of Chinese reading

Against single-mechanism models imported from alphabetic-script research, Mo's program argued that skilled Chinese reading depends on two processes — a direct whole-word route and an analytic decomposition route — operating in parallel, with evidence from priming, eye-tracking and development. The theory consolidated Chinese-language cognitive research on reading in the line begun by Peng Danling, and gave the field a distinctly script-sensitive alternative to universal models.

Language and perception, experimentally

The 2010 PNAS study — training listeners on new lexical categories and measuring color perception — brought a classic Whorfian question into the lab and found lateralized effects, a landmark of the Chinese contribution to language-and-thought research and to social psychology's cultural wing.