Yoolim Kim is a psycholinguist researching language processing, and in particular, the ways in which the language's written form affects the mental representation of the language. She specializes in Hangul and is interested in how the relationship between Hangul and Hanja influences the structure of the mental lexicon. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2019, which explored the effects of Hanja on semantic processing in Sino-Korean. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher within the Minds and Traditions Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Her research involved developing a large-scale online game application designed to crowdsource a typology of letter shapes, in an effort to better understand the visual properties that make characters belonging to the same writing system distinct from one another.
Yoolim's research has been supported by the Oxford Clarendon Fund, the Scatherd Europrean Scholarship, and Wolfson College, Oxford. She has also previously collaborated with the Cultural Brain Group within the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining the structure of Korean's bi-scriptal lexicon and undertaking further experimental work using classic psychological methods to explore the status of Hanja in speakers of Korean with varying levels of literacy and proficiency in both the written and spoken language.