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Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the... more
Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the bilingual child’s languages con-stitute separate systems. The past decade has witnessed an intense debate over whether the two linguistic systems, although separate in principle, may nevertheless interact. Yip and Matthews provide substantial empirical evidence in favour of this view, arguing that bilingual children develop differently from monolinguals. Moreover, they show that many developmental phenomena in bilingual data are paralleled by similar features in contact varieties, such as Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), and they argue that bilin-gual acquisition can have the effect of establishing substrate influence in a contact lan-guage. In particular, mutual influence occurring in bilingual development – so goes the hypothesis – provides one me...
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of... more
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of overlapping areas without significant differences in neural signatures. This different pattern of findings led us to ask the question of where nouns and verbs of two different languages are represented in various areas in the brain in Chinese–English bilinguals. In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a lexical decision paradigm involving Chinese and English verbs and nouns to address this question. We found that while Chinese nouns and verbs involved activation of common brain areas, the processing of English verbs engaged many more regions than did the processing of English nouns. Specifically, compared to English nouns, English verb presentation was associated with stronger activation of the left putamen and c...
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction... more
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction ([(NP1)-ba-NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among heritage Mandarin children (n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in the UK. The results showed considerable similarities between the children and their parents in a number of key structural properties of the ba-construction. However, the children produced the ba-construction with reduced frequency and in a “heritage variety” with a reduced set of nominal and verbal phrases in NP2 and VP, which is not attested in a group of age-matched Mandarin speakers in Beijing. Additionally, higher frequency of the ba-construction in the heritage children’s production is associated with greater lexical diversity, rather than higher frequency of the ba-construction, in their parental input. We lay out positive ...
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This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a)... more
This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive accentuation in English sentences. Results show that accentuation played little role in Cantonese learners’ comprehension of focus, whereas it affected how accurately and quickly Dutch learners and native controls comprehended focus. Dutch learners were even more efficient than native controls in comprehending focus-to-accentuation mapping. Furthermore, both L2 groups could successfully perceive accentuation in English sentences. These findings suggest that multiple interfaces might not be equally problematic for L2 learners with different L1s, and convergence at multiple interfaces in L2 is possible. The comprehension difficulty observed in Cantonese learners c...
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This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results... more
This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, inp...
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This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common... more
This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still s...
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This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated... more
This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study using modified forced choice, video choice, and elicited production techniques with five groups of children (two- to six-year-olds) and an adult control group. Three-year-olds were sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, suggesting guidance from principles of aspect shift and subevent modification. On the other hand, distributional properties of the input play a role in acquiring the interpretation and word order of zai: e.g., four-year-olds significantly differed from adults in accepting non-target V-zai sentences, as some verb classes can take postverbal prepositional phrases with zai while others cannot...
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Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin,... more
Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.Abstract:
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Whether relative clauses can be identified in Chinese is a recurrent question. We ask whether relative clauses are distinct from other noun-modifying clause constructions in Cantonese, one of many East Asian languages in which a noun can... more
Whether relative clauses can be identified in Chinese is a recurrent question. We ask whether relative clauses are distinct from other noun-modifying clause constructions in Cantonese, one of many East Asian languages in which a noun can be preceded by a diverse range of modifying clauses. The relationship between head noun and modifying clause may be a grammatical one, with the head noun being understood as an argument or an adjunct of the modifying clause; or its interpretation may be dependent on semantic and pragmatic factors. We conclude that Cantonese has a General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction as proposed for Japanese (Matsumoto et al., this volume), with relative clauses forming a subset of modifying clauses in which a grammatical relation obtains.
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This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve... more
This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve a function similar to that of the Cantonese perfective marker zo2 in the bilingual children, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles such as the sentence-final particle laa3. The results suggest that in contact-induced grammaticalization, it is possible to develop a new category in the replica language based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an evolutionary approach to language transmission (Mufwene, 2001), we discuss why grammaticalization in the Cantonese-English bilingual children does not seem to involve coevolution of form and meaning, why the grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children are only transient, and how the s...
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This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of... more
This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of Yuan (1994; see also Lakshmanan and Teranishi 1994) that successful acquisition of second-language (L2) binding properties might be explained in terms of similar properties instantiated in learners' native languages (NL). This view we term the Positive Transfer hypothesis. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we ...
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The emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children is examined from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already to mark perfective aspect. While this function... more
The emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children is examined from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already to mark perfective aspect. While this function resembles that of the Cantonese perfective marker, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles. The results suggest that a new category in the replica language may be based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an ecology-based approach, we discuss how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics.
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We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin: (i) the prenominal position of RCs; (ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object... more
We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin: (i) the prenominal position of RCs; (ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object RCs; and (iii) Chinese RCs as a subset of noun modifying constructions (NMCs). Acquisition studies suggest that Chinese differs from languages with post-nominal RCs, which show a robust advantage for subject-gapped over object-gapped RCs. For Cantonese, some studies suggest an object advantage, which may be explained by the surface identity of object RCs and SVO main clauses and/or the internally-headed analysis. Finally, Chinese RCs can be analyzed as a subset of NMCs in which a modifying clause is attached to the head noun based on semantic-pragmatic relations.
It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the... more
It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the individual and community-level processes, focusing on the process of grammaticalization in circumstances of language contact and the corresponding developmental processes in bilingual acquisition. The phenomena chosen for discussion are drawn from Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) and from the Hong Kong Bilingual Corpus (Yip & Matthews 2000, 2007). Parallel developments in SCE and bilingual acquisition are analysed as cases of contact-induced grammaticalization as defined by Heine and Kuteva (2003; 2005), with some modifications. The emergence of already as a marker of aspect presents a case of ‘ordinary’ contact-induced grammaticalization, while the development of grammatical functions of give represents a case of replica grammaticalization. One implication of these findings is that bilingual first language acquisition is a possible route for substrate influence, both in general and specifically in the development of contact languages such as pidgins and creoles.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Ecology, German, French, and 11 moreItalian, Processing, Eve, Man, Code Switching, Transfer, Topicalization, Asynchrony, Syntactic, Qi, and Bloom
Research Interests: Developmental Psychology, German, Bootstrapping, Transparency, Li, and 11 moreEve, Transfer, Gene, Acceleration, Split, Dominance, Topicalization, Multiple, Asynchrony, Syntactic, and Bloom
CUHK Sir. ...
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This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their... more
This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their preschool years. Aspects of their English show features and structures that are quite unlike their monolingual counterparts, many of which are attributable to transfer from the dominant language, in this case Cantonese. One of the most striking Cantonese-based features observed in the first ...
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In this chapter we will discuss three aspects of Chinese bilingualism. First, we are interested in the cognition and neuro-cognition of language as well as general processing in bilingual people who speak Chinese as either their dominant... more
In this chapter we will discuss three aspects of Chinese bilingualism. First, we are interested in the cognition and neuro-cognition of language as well as general processing in bilingual people who speak Chinese as either their dominant or subordinate language. In this section we focus on how bilingual processing may impact on their other aspects of cognition, whether their two languages share one common computational/neuro-cognitive substrate or are based upon separate processing mechanisms, how the bilingual verbal memories are ...
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As this article doesn't contain an abstract, the image below is necessary to enable the article to be indexed by certain search engines. Note, the resolution of the full-text PDF is much higher than that shown here. ... THE... more
As this article doesn't contain an abstract, the image below is necessary to enable the article to be indexed by certain search engines. Note, the resolution of the full-text PDF is much higher than that shown here. ... THE ACQUISITION AND USE OF MOTION EVENT EXPRESSIONS IN CHINESE. Liang Chen. Munich, Germany: Lincom Europa, 2007. Pp. 144. ... THE ACQUISITION AND USE OF MOTION EVENT EXPRESSIONS IN CHINESE. Liang Chen. Munich, Germany: Lincom Europa, 2007. Pp. 144.
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CJO storage migration Due to a necessary storage migration, Cambridge Journals Online will be unavailable between 10: 00 am and 11: 00 pm BST,(09: 00 and 10: 00 am GMT) on the 9th September 2012. Microscopy Today and Materials360 Online... more
CJO storage migration Due to a necessary storage migration, Cambridge Journals Online will be unavailable between 10: 00 am and 11: 00 pm BST,(09: 00 and 10: 00 am GMT) on the 9th September 2012. Microscopy Today and Materials360 Online between 09: 00am and 01: 00pm. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
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It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the... more
It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the individual and community-level processes, focusing on the process of grammaticalization in circumstances of language contact and the corresponding developmental processes in bilingual acquisition. The phenomena chosen for discussion are drawn from Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) and from the Hong Kong Bilingual Corpus (Yip & Matthews 2000, 2007). Parallel developments in SCE and bilingual acquisition are analysed as cases of contact-induced grammaticalization as defined by Heine and Kuteva (2003; 2005), with some modifications. The emergence ofalreadyas a marker of aspect presents a case of ‘ordinary’ contact-induced grammaticalization, while the development of grammatical functions ofgiverepresents a case of replica grammaticalization. One implica...
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How second language (L2) learning is achieved in the human brain remains one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience and linguistics. Previous neuroimaging studies with bilinguals have consistently shown overlapping cortical... more
How second language (L2) learning is achieved in the human brain remains one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience and linguistics. Previous neuroimaging studies with bilinguals have consistently shown overlapping cortical organization of the native language (L1) and L2, leading to a prediction that a common neurobiological marker may be responsible for the development of the two languages. Here, by using functional MRI, we show that later skills to read in L2 are predicted by the activity level of the fusiform–caudate circuit in the left hemisphere, which nonetheless is not predictive of the ability to read in the native language. We scanned 10-y-old children while they performed a lexical decision task on L2 (and L1) stimuli. The subjects’ written language (reading) skills were behaviorally assessed twice, the first time just before we performed the fMRI scan (time 1 reading) and the second time 1 y later (time 2 reading). A whole-brain based analysis revealed that activity...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Computer Science, Anterior Cingulate, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Lexical Semantics, and 15 moreLanguage, Medicine, Neuroimmunology, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Neuroimage, Male, Frontal Cortex, Mental processes, Adult, Parietal Lobe, For Reading, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Page 1. AUTHORS INDEX VOLUME 14 2005 Cole, Peter, 59 Hermon, Gabriella, 59 Irwin, Mark, 121 Kong, Stano, 227 Kurisu, Kazutaka, 175 Kuroda, S.-Y., 1 Matthews, Stephen, 267 Soh, Hooi Ling, 155 Tomioka, Satoshi, 89 Tsai, Yaping, 89 Wu,... more
Page 1. AUTHORS INDEX VOLUME 14 2005 Cole, Peter, 59 Hermon, Gabriella, 59 Irwin, Mark, 121 Kong, Stano, 227 Kurisu, Kazutaka, 175 Kuroda, S.-Y., 1 Matthews, Stephen, 267 Soh, Hooi Ling, 155 Tomioka, Satoshi, 89 Tsai, Yaping, 89 Wu, Jiun-Shiung, 299 Xu, Huiling, 267 Yip, Virginia, 267 Journal of East Asian Linguistics (2005) 14: 339
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Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007,... more
Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007, p.15). There is as yet little consensus on the question, with divergent views regarding both BFLA at the individual level and the implications for language change at the community level.
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CUHK Sir. ...
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Since these areas are vulnerable even for most of the children with Cantonese as their dominant language, they are all the more likely to be vulnerable in Cantonese as a heritage language when English is the dominant language. In each... more
Since these areas are vulnerable even for most of the children with Cantonese as their dominant language, they are all the more likely to be vulnerable in Cantonese as a heritage language when English is the dominant language. In each case there is partial overlap between the Cantonese and English word order which forms the basis for crosslinguistic influence. Language universals and language specific properties will be discussed to account for the vulnerability.
Interlanguage studies have become very populär in theoretical äs well äs applied linguistics: there has been a rapidly growing number of publications in this field and any introduction to second language acquisition contains nümerous... more
Interlanguage studies have become very populär in theoretical äs well äs applied linguistics: there has been a rapidly growing number of publications in this field and any introduction to second language acquisition contains nümerous references to this phenomenon. This collection of papers on The Current State of Interlanguage.
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Abstract: Papers in this volume include the following:" Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners"(Hua Dong Fan);" The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification"(Thomas Lee);" Do... more
Abstract: Papers in this volume include the following:" Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners"(Hua Dong Fan);" The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification"(Thomas Lee);" Do Learning Environments Make a Difference? A Study on the Acquisition of the English Interrogatives by Three Types of Cantonese Classroom Learners"(Gladys Tang);" The Stress Patterns of Nonsense English Words of Cantonese-speaking ESL Learners"(Cathy Wong);" Relative Complexity: Beyond Avoidance:(Virginia ...
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CUHK Sir. ...
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This paper discusses the different developmental stages of wh-interrogatives in the English produced by Hong Kong bilingual children which find a parallel in Chinese Pidgin English, a contact variety of English. The longitudinal data from... more
This paper discusses the different developmental stages of wh-interrogatives in the English produced by Hong Kong bilingual children which find a parallel in Chinese Pidgin English, a contact variety of English. The longitudinal data from the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus (Yip and Matthews 2000, in press) and diary records kept by the parents show that these bilingual children go through an initial wh-in-situ stage (1), followed by a stage at which optional and partial wh-movement (2) are evidenced in their English.
● Early bilingual acquisition as an emerging field standing at the intersection of the fields of bilingualism and language acquisition.● Bilingual development in 2 groups of bilingual children in our longitudinal studies:(a) one... more
● Early bilingual acquisition as an emerging field standing at the intersection of the fields of bilingualism and language acquisition.● Bilingual development in 2 groups of bilingual children in our longitudinal studies:(a) one parent-one one language families;(b) one parent-two language two language families.● Integration of research and application: need for education practices, parental strategies to be informed by current research
We begin with some fundamental issues concerning “Chinese” as heritage language. Just as it is necessary to distinguish World Englishes, it is crucial to distinguish between varieties of Chinese. While Chinese is often equated with... more
We begin with some fundamental issues concerning “Chinese” as heritage language. Just as it is necessary to distinguish World Englishes, it is crucial to distinguish between varieties of Chinese. While Chinese is often equated with Mandarin or Putonghua, Cantonese and other varieties are equally strongly represented as heritage languages. We examine some common misconceptions about the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin and show that Cantonese is an independent language with its own grammar. Cantonese, ...
This thesis tries to discover the difficulties in the acquisition of the Mandarin “gei” by Cantonese-speaking learners. Basing on the analysis of the distinction between Mandarin “gei” and Cantonese “bei”, two studies are designed to test... more
This thesis tries to discover the difficulties in the acquisition of the Mandarin “gei” by Cantonese-speaking learners. Basing on the analysis of the distinction between Mandarin “gei” and Cantonese “bei”, two studies are designed to test different responses between the experimental group (Hong Kong group) and the control group (Beijing group). Study 1 in Chapter 3 is to test the written form of the Mandarin “gei”, and Study 2 in Chapter 4 is for the spontaneous speech.
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We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin:(i) the prenominal position of RCs;(ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object... more
We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin:(i) the prenominal position of RCs;(ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object RCs; and (iii) Chinese RCs as a subset of noun modifying constructions (NMCs). Acquisition studies suggest that Chinese differs from languages with postnominal RCs, which show a robust advantage for subject-gapped over objectgapped RCs. For Cantonese, some studies suggest an object advantage, which ...
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The paper focuses on the properties of relative pronouns in the acquisition of relative clause by Chinese EFL learners. Based on the NPAH (noun phrase accessibility hierarchy), comparison and contrast of some aspects of English and... more
The paper focuses on the properties of relative pronouns in the acquisition of relative clause by Chinese EFL learners. Based on the NPAH (noun phrase accessibility hierarchy), comparison and contrast of some aspects of English and Chinese relative pronoun, the paper conducts two experiments, and has proved the hypotheses that students' performance generally follows the hierarchy of NPAH and students do have problems with relative pronoun involving prepositions. Besides, some pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching are discussed.
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The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to collect the intellectual output of HKU and make it available to the widest possible audience. Records are made in the Hub for items that are... more
The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to collect the intellectual output of HKU and make it available to the widest possible audience. Records are made in the Hub for items that are fulltext open access, or for URLs that hyperlink ...
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This paper investigates a subtype of resultative predicate marked by the verbal particle-can in Cantonese and associated with adversative meaning. A number of central properties of this verbal particle and issues related to the phenomena... more
This paper investigates a subtype of resultative predicate marked by the verbal particle-can in Cantonese and associated with adversative meaning. A number of central properties of this verbal particle and issues related to the phenomena of causativity and unaccusativity are explored with particular reference to the aspectual properties of the V-can predicates. We also examine the constraints on the structural projection of arguments of each type of predicate. It is shown that the possibility/impossibility of causative/unaccusative ...
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Bilingual acquisition is a fast-growing field of interdisciplinary research, seeking to understand how children acquire two languages simultaneously in the first years of life. Many children grow up in families where more than one... more
Bilingual acquisition is a fast-growing field of interdisciplinary research, seeking to understand how children acquire two languages simultaneously in the first years of life. Many children grow up in families where more than one language is spoken on a regular basis. This chapter discusses some of the major issues and findings in the study of early bilingual acquisition with special reference to studies involving a Chinese language as one of the target languages. The field of bilingual acquisition can be characterized as the ...
CUHK Sir. ...
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While evidence from adult language tends to argue against such an analysis, some evidence for it comes from child language (Matthews & Yip 2002). Firstly, early object relatives such as (3) which are not well-formed in terms of adult... more
While evidence from adult language tends to argue against such an analysis, some evidence for it comes from child language (Matthews & Yip 2002). Firstly, early object relatives such as (3) which are not well-formed in terms of adult grammar are consistent with a head internal analysis:
Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007, p.... more
Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007, p. 15). There is as yet little consensus on the question, with divergent views regarding both BFLA at the individual level and the implications for language change at the community level. The keynote article by Meisel (henceforth M) is a welcome contribution to this discussion. We especially applaud his ...
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Passive, unaccusative and pretransitive constructions in Chaozhou. In Chinese Linguistics in Leipzig, p. 163-174. Paris: Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2008 [How to Cite?] ... Passive, unaccusative and pretransitive... more
Passive, unaccusative and pretransitive constructions in Chaozhou. In Chinese Linguistics in Leipzig, p. 163-174. Paris: Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2008 [How to Cite?] ... Passive, unaccusative and pretransitive constructions in Chaozhou. In Chinese Linguistics in Leipzig, p. 163-174. Paris: Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2008 [How to Cite?] ... Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales.
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Basic Cantonese introduces the essentials of Cantonese grammar in a straightforward and systematic way. Each of the 28 units deals with a grammatical point and provides associated exercises, devised to perfect communication skills.... more
Basic Cantonese introduces the essentials of Cantonese grammar in a straightforward and systematic way. Each of the 28 units deals with a grammatical point and provides associated exercises, devised to perfect communication skills. Special attention is paid to topics which differ from English and European language structures. Features include: clear, accessible format; lively examples to illustrate each grammar point; full key to exercises; and glossary of grammatical terms.
How second language (L2) learning is achieved in the human brain remains one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience and linguistics. Previous neuroimaging studies with bilinguals have consistently shown overlapping cortical... more
How second language (L2) learning is achieved in the human brain remains one of the fundamental questions of neuroscience and linguistics. Previous neuroimaging studies with bilinguals have consistently shown overlapping cortical organization of the native language (L1) and L2, leading to a prediction that a common neurobiological marker may be responsible for the development of the two languages. Here, by using functional MRI, we show that later skills to read in L2 are predicted by the activity level of the fusiform– ...
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As the field of bilingual acquisition has made significant advances in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the acquisition of Chinese languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts. This article serves a dual purpose:(1)... more
As the field of bilingual acquisition has made significant advances in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the acquisition of Chinese languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts. This article serves a dual purpose:(1) to discuss some theoretical and methodological issues in bilingual acquisition with special reference to Chinese languages as target languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts; and (2) to highlight the important contributions made by the five articles in this volume, with some commentary on the issues ...
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Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship... more
Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the individual and community-level processes, focusing on the process of grammaticalization in circumstances of language contact and the corresponding developmental processes in bilingual acquisition. The phenomena chosen for discussion are drawn from Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) ...
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Abstract: This paper discusses two influential studies on relative clauses (RC), and addresses the development of relative clauses in the interlanguage of advanced Chinese English-as-a-Second-Language speakers in light of the theory of... more
Abstract: This paper discusses two influential studies on relative clauses (RC), and addresses the development of relative clauses in the interlanguage of advanced Chinese English-as-a-Second-Language speakers in light of the theory of Accessibility Hierarchy (AH). As the two theories predict, avoidance of RCs is typically found with oblique and genitive rather than with objects or subjects of RCs. Error types are similar to those found for learners of other first-language backgrounds. The use of Resumptive Pronouns in ...
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Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have achieved basic proficiency and wish to progress to more complex language. Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with communicatively-oriented exercises... more
Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have achieved basic proficiency and wish to progress to more complex language. Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with communicatively-oriented exercises to help build confidence and fluency. * Suitable for independent learners and students on taught courses * Many authentic examples from contemporary media, including films, advertising, songs and soap operas * Clear distinction between colloquial and more formal speech registers * Teaches contemporary Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong Intermediate Cantonese and its sister volume, Basic Cantonese, form a structured course of the essentials of Cantonese grammar.
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Abstract: A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties.... more
Abstract: A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties. However, this does not seem to facilitate learning of the target English construction. Furthermore, the passive ergatives are not attributable to exemplification in either the native or the second language, but this distinct type of interlanguage has its own peculiar character. Overgeneration of passivized ...
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1. Background The findings in this paper form part of a larger project investigating the bilingual acquisition of children simultaneously exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The data are drawn from The Hong Kong Bilingual Child... more
1. Background The findings in this paper form part of a larger project investigating the bilingual acquisition of children simultaneously exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The data are drawn from The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, a longitudinal corpus which is now available via the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) archive at http://childes. psy. cmu. edu/. 2 The corpus released to date contains five children's data with over 340 files of transcripts, half in English and half in Cantonese. ...
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This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of... more
This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of Yuan (1994; see also Lakshmanan and Teranishi 1994) that successful acquisition of second-language (L2) binding properties might be explained in terms of similar properties instantiated in learners' native languages (NL). This view we term the Positive Transfer hypothesis. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we ...
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A distinctive syntactic feature of the Chaozhou dialect group is the use of the same morpheme in the passive and in certain intransitive constructions. In the Jieyang variety, the passive marker k'eG derived from the verb... more
A distinctive syntactic feature of the Chaozhou dialect group is the use of the same morpheme in the passive and in certain intransitive constructions. In the Jieyang variety, the passive marker k'eG derived from the verb 'give'requires an agent, a requirement which we relate to the subcategorization of the lexical verb 'give'. We show that the same morpheme is used with unaccusative verbs in the form [k'eG i V], where i is an expletive pronominal: it cannot encode an agent because the unaccusative predicates concerned lack an agent ...
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Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of... more
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of overlapping areas without significant differences in neural signatures. This different pattern of findings led us to ask the question of where nouns and verbs of two different languages are represented in various areas in the brain in Chinese–English bilinguals. In this study, we utilized functional ...
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The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways... more
The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU). Comparison of MLU in the child's 2 languages is subject to questions of comparability across languages. Using the Hong Kong Bilingual corpus of Cantonese–English children's development, we ...
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Aspects of contemporary Cantonese grammar: the structure and stratification of relative clauses. In Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives, p. 266-281. Edited by Hilary Chappell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001... more
Aspects of contemporary Cantonese grammar: the structure and stratification of relative clauses. In Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives, p. 266-281. Edited by Hilary Chappell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001 [How to Cite?] ... Aspects of contemporary Cantonese grammar: the structure and stratification of relative clauses. In Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives, p. 266-281. Edited by Hilary Chappell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001 [How to Cite?] ... Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives. ...
Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be... more
Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These ...
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One important issue in neuroimaging research on language is how the brain processes and represents lexical semantics. Past studies with various paradigms reveal that the left inferior prefrontal and midsuperior temporal regions play a... more
One important issue in neuroimaging research on language is how the brain processes and represents lexical semantics. Past studies with various paradigms reveal that the left inferior prefrontal and midsuperior temporal regions play a crucial role in semantic processing. Those studies, however, typically utilize words having a precise and dominant meaning as stimuli and have not manipulated lexico-semantic ambiguity, a key feature of human language, as an experimental variable. Here, we used a word generation paradigm to ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Computer Science, Anterior Cingulate, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Lexical Semantics, and 15 moreLanguage, Medicine, Neuroimmunology, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Neuroimage, Male, Frontal Cortex, Mental processes, Adult, Parietal Lobe, For Reading, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their... more
This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their preschool years. Aspects of their English show features and structures that are quite unlike their monolingual counterparts, many of which are attributable to transfer from the dominant language, in this case Cantonese. One of the most striking Cantonese-based features observed in the first ...
Perhaps one of the questions most often raised by language teaching professionals is whether students should be taught grammar and if it really helps. It would be most welcome if there were a definite yes or no answer. If it were... more
Perhaps one of the questions most often raised by language teaching professionals is whether students should be taught grammar and if it really helps. It would be most welcome if there were a definite yes or no answer. If it were demonstrated that grammatical instruction does not help in any circumstances, we need not bother about it and could then turn to other ways of teaching methodology. If it could be shown conclusively to help, then we would need to know in what circumstances and how to go about it. Unfortunately, the question is ...
This star-studded volume is based on a workshop on childhood bilingualism held in 2004 with many renowned researchers in the field as contributors. The emerging field of childhood bilingualism is well served by this timely volume that... more
This star-studded volume is based on a workshop on childhood bilingualism held in 2004 with many renowned researchers in the field as contributors. The emerging field of childhood bilingualism is well served by this timely volume that aims to establish a foundation and research agenda for years to come. The volume consists of 11 articles and is divided into five parts that cover (a) language processing,(b) cognitive and social development,(c) literacy development,(d) other perspectives from adult bilingualism and ...
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Previous work leaves open the question of whether children with autism spectrum disorders aged 6-12 years have delay in producing gestures compared to their typically developing peers. This study examined gestural production among... more
Previous work leaves open the question of whether children with autism spectrum disorders aged 6-12 years have delay in producing gestures compared to their typically developing peers. This study examined gestural production among school-aged children in a naturalistic context and how their gestures are semantically related to the accompanying speech. Delay in gestural production was found in children with autism spectrum disorders through their middle to late childhood. Compared to their typically developing counterparts, children with autism spectrum disorders gestured less often and used fewer types of gestures, in particular markers, which carry culture-specific meaning. Typically developing children's gestural production was related to language and cognitive skills, but among children with autism spectrum disorders, gestural production was more strongly related to the severity of socio-communicative impairment. Gesture impairment also included the failure to integrate speec...
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Grammaticality judgments reflect a compound product of both grammatical and processing factors. But because they interact in a symbiotic way, very often grammatical and processing constraints are difficult to separate. According to... more
Grammaticality judgments reflect a compound product of both grammatical and processing factors. But because they interact in a symbiotic way, very often grammatical and processing constraints are difficult to separate. According to generally accepted grammatical theory,(a) Who do you think John told Mary he fell in love with? and (b) Who do you think John told Mary fell in love with Sue? are equally grammatical. We have observed, however, that native speakers strongly accept sentences like (a) as grammatical but react quite ...