Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre
Encyclopedia
Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) is an academic organization of the Department of Linguistics
and Modern Languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
.
; serving children and parents in Hong Kong and the region by studying childhood bilingualism and propagating its positive outcomes; documenting the development of bilingualism in bilingual children from its inception to maturity and demonstrate their achievements in attaining bilingual competence in childhood; raising the public’s awareness of Hong Kong children’s development of biliteracy and trilingualism; studying and supporting revitalization of minority languages in the context of bilingual and multilingual education. The centre is directed by Professor Virginia Yip
(CUHK) and Dr. Stephen Matthews (HKU).
and Cantonese grammar
inform and inspire each other.
Books
bilingual corpora by collecting naturalistic speech data from children
-who are exposed to Cantonese and English
simultaneously in early childhood
-who acquire English or Cantonese as a second language
Books
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
“Early syntactic development in Cantonese-English bilingual children” Contemporary Linguistics 6.1.1-18.
Research Projects
- Transitive
Constructions
- Dative Constructions
- Relative Clauses
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and Modern Languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Chinese University of Hong Kong is a research-led university in Hong Kong.CUHK is the only tertiary education institution in Hong Kong with Nobel Prize winners on its faculty, including Chen Ning Yang, James Mirrlees, Robert Alexander Mundell and Charles K. Kao...
.
Purpose
CBRC aims at achieving excellence in research in childhood bilingualism and multilingualismMultilingualism
Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...
; serving children and parents in Hong Kong and the region by studying childhood bilingualism and propagating its positive outcomes; documenting the development of bilingualism in bilingual children from its inception to maturity and demonstrate their achievements in attaining bilingual competence in childhood; raising the public’s awareness of Hong Kong children’s development of biliteracy and trilingualism; studying and supporting revitalization of minority languages in the context of bilingual and multilingual education. The centre is directed by Professor Virginia Yip
Virginia Yip
Virginia Yip, a linguist, is director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. She is currently a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include bilingual language acquisition, second language acquisition, Cantonese, Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar,...
(CUHK) and Dr. Stephen Matthews (HKU).
Cantonese Grammar
Researchers at CBRC study the grammar of Cantonese systematically from cross-linguistic, processing, and developmental perspectives in order to see how studies in language acquisitionLanguage acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
and Cantonese grammar
Cantonese grammar
Cantonese is an analytic language where, in a sentence, the arrangement of words is important to its meaning. A basic sentence is in form of SVO, i.e. a subject is followed by a verb then by an object, though this order is often violated because Cantonese is a Topic-prominent language. Unlike...
inform and inspire each other.
Books
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
: RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
. (eBook is available) See online review by Blaine Erickson - Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
: RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
. (eBook is available) See review by Fang Yew-Jin (2001). Asian Studies Review 25.3.379-381. - Yip, V. 1995. Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English. AmsterdamAmsterdamAmsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
: John BenjaminsJohn BenjaminsJohn Benjamins Publishing Company is an independent academic publisher in social sciences and humanities with its head office in Amsterdam. Its North American office is in Philadelphia, United StatesIt is especially noted for its publications in linguistics...
. - Matthews, S & V. Yip. 1994. Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar. LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
: RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
. (eBook is available) - The JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
translation of Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar by Matthews and Yip (London: Routledge1994) 廣東語文法 is translated by Eiichi Chishima 千島英一 and Shin Kataoka 片岡新 2000
Corpus-Based Studies
Researchers construct longitudinalLongitudinal study
A longitudinal study is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time — often many decades. It is a type of observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the...
bilingual corpora by collecting naturalistic speech data from children
-who are exposed to Cantonese and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
simultaneously in early childhood
-who acquire English or Cantonese as a second language
Second language
A second language or L2 is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or lingua francas ....
- The Hong Kong Child Second Language Corpus (ongoing)
Books
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2007. The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
- Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2007. Relative Clauses in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children: Typological Challenges and Processing Motivations. Studies in Second Language AcquisitionStudies in Second Language AcquisitionStudies in Second Language Acquisition is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Cambridge University Press. The editors for 2008 were Albert Valdman of Indiana University and Susan Gass of Michigan State University.- External links :...
29: 277-300 - Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2006. Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: a case for mean length utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly. 3(2), 97–116
- Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2005. Dual input and learnability: null objects in Cantonese-English bilingual children. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, 2421-2431. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Yip, V. 2006. Early bilingual acquisition in the Chinese context. In Li P., L-H .Tan, E. Bates & O. Tzeng. (eds.) Handbook of East Asian PsycholinguisticsPsycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
(Vol.1). Cambridge: Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, pp. 148–162. - Yip, V. 2004. 粵英雙語兒童早期的語法發展《當代語言學》第一期, 1-18 頁.
“Early syntactic development in Cantonese-English bilingual children” Contemporary Linguistics 6.1.1-18.
- Matthews, S. & V. Yip. 2002. "Relative Clauses in Early Bilingual Development: Transfer and Universals," in A. Giacalone (ed.), Typology and Second Language Acquisition. Mouton de Gruyter. See online review of the book by Malcolm Finney
- Matthews, S.& V. Yip. 2001. "The Structure and Stratification of Relative Clauses in Contemporary Cantonese," in H. Chappell (ed.), Sinitic Grammar:Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives. Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 266-281. - Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000."Syntactic Transfer in a Cantonese-English Bilingual Child" Bilingualism: Language and CognitionBilingualism: Language and CognitionBilingualism: Language and Cognition is a peer-reviewed linguistics journal, focusing on the study of multilingualism. The journal is currently published by Cambridge University Press and was cofounded by François Grosjean in 1998....
3.3.193-208.
Experimental Psycholinguistics
In order to look into how Hong Kong children process words and sentences in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, researchers conduct experiments to investigate children's comprehension and production.Research Projects
- Hong Kong Children’s Acquisition of Complex Constructions in Cantonese, English and Mandarin]
- Transitive
Transitivity (grammatical category)
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
Constructions
- Dative Constructions
- Relative Clauses
- A Receptive Vocabulary Test for Hong Kong Children's Mandarin
- Relationship between Lexical and Grammatical Competence in Hong Kong Children's Cantonese, English and Mandarin
External links
- Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre CBRC Homepage
- Virginia Yip CUHK Homepage
- Stephen Matthews HKU Homepage
- The Chinese Pidgin English featuring: Stephen Matthews(HKU)as colonial Brit
- Interview with Brian MacWhinney (Director of CHILDES) Part 1
- Interview with Brian MacWhinney (Director of CHILDES) Part 2