Research Strengths

The Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) strives (i) to strengthen our reputation in empirical, inter-disciplinary research, (ii) to enhance our research capacity in computational and corpus linguistics, as well as language, cognition, and neuroscience (LCN), (iii) to extend international collaborations, and (iv) to nurture young scholars to secure external grants and produce high-quality outputs in high-ranking journals.

Major Research Programmes

Bilingualism & Communication Key programmes include strategies/processes in corporate communication; bilingual interaction, bilingual education, and second language learning; plurilingual language development and language use in multilingual societies; language policy & planning; contrastive grammar of Chinese and other languages.

Chinese Language Education: Assessment, TCFL, Acquisition, and Communication Disorder
Chinese language education, teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and teaching Chinese for specific purposes, including Chinese curriculum development, pedagogies and assessment ; L1 & L2 acquisition; L2 pedagogical grammar; intercultural mediation; psycholinguistics; speech production and perception; developmental dyslexia; learner tools creation and evaluation; and neurolinguistic underpinnings of communication disorder and its cure (ERP, fMRI).

Language and Technology
This area covers Chinese language processing, ontology-lexicon interface, language resources, language and emotion, corpus-based approaches to linguistic theories in language technology, computer-assisted language learning, machine(-assisted) translation, multimedia corpus design.

Linguistics of Chinese and Other East Asian Languages
Chinese linguistics covers lexicography, Cantonese linguistics/grammar, dialects studies, language and society, morpho-syntax, pragmatics, lexical semantics, linguistic ontology, script and lexicology, phonetics & phonology, comparative linguistics, and typology. Studies in Japanese and Korean in a foreign language setting (JFL and KFL) include discourse analysis, profiling of registers, and salient usage patterns of advanced JFL and KFL learners.

Translation and Interpreting Studies
We adopt a corpus-based approach to translation research and teaching, focusing on translation universals.`We use empirically grounded methods to probe into neurolinguistic and cognitive aspects of the translation process (eye-tracking, key-logging data, and think-aloud protocols). Our interpreting research focuses on the interplay of language and cognition, using neuro-physiological & neuro-linguistic tools to study professional and novice interpreters' cerebral lateralization.