Prof. Virginia Yip

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  • Biographical Sketch
  • Talk Title and Abstract

Virginia Yip is Professor and Director of Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at CUHK, Co-Director of the Bilingualism and Language Disorders Laboratory at CUHK-Shenzhen Research Institute and Director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Peking University-University System of Taiwan Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity. Her research interests include bilingualism, bilingual acquisition, second language acquisition, comparative Chinese grammar, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. She serves on the editorial board of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingualism, Languages, Second Language Research and Multilingual Education.


Title:
A multimedia Mandarin child language corpus

Abstract:
This presentation introduces a new multimedia child Mandarin corpus which is to be deposited in the CHILDES archive. The corpus as initially released consists of 22 one-hour transcripts of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4 (Deng and Yip to appear). The transcripts are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to videos. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as video linking. We hope that this case study will inform other researchers about methods of data collection, data coding, and media linkage. The new data will benefit researchers interested in the acquisition of Mandarin, and serve as baseline data for studies on bilingual and multilingual language acquisition, such as the acquisition of Mandarin as a heritage language investigated by Mai (2012, to appear) and Mai and Yip (2015).