Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre

Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) is an academic organization of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It aims at achieving excellence in research in childhood bilingualism and multilingualism; 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).^[1]

Research

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 acquisition and Cantonese grammar inform and inspire each other.

Books

• Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge. (eBook is available) See online review by Blaine Erickson
• Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: 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. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Matthews, S & V. Yip. 1994. Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. (eBook is available)
• The Japanese 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 longitudinal 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

• The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus

• 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 Press.

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 Acquisition 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 Psycholinguistics (Vol.1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 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 Press, 266-281.
• Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000."Syntactic Transfer in a Cantonese-English Bilingual Child" Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 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 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

1. ^ Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2010. Promoting Bilingualism Research in Hong Kong and East Asia: The Childhood Bilinguailsm Research Center. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 38. 2: 396-403.

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