Professor Ziyin Mai received BA and MA degrees from Peking University, and MPhil and PhD from University of Cambridge. She completed postdoctoral training at the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at CUHK in 2014, and served as Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor at CUHK from 2015 to 2020. Before returning to CUHK in 2023, she was Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong (2020-2023).

Her current research interests are language acquisition and multilingualism. She has used corpus, experimental and statistical methods to investigate the maintenance of Chinese in heritage speakers of Chinese raised in English-dominant contexts like the UK and US, the (un)balanced development of Cantonese, English and Mandarin in young children in multilingual communities such as Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Singapore, as well as the representation and online processing of complex grammatical features by adult native and non-native speakers of Chinese.

Professor Mai is the Principal Investigator of several longitudinal research projects investigating the dynamic and intricate relations between multilingual input and acquisition outcomes in infants, toddlers and preschoolers in the Greater Bay Area of China, funded by the Research Grants Council, HKSAR. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Second Language Research, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and is currently Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. She regularly delivers seminar and workshop talks for parents, teachers and educators to promote evidence-based home language input planning and pedagogical interventions for monolingual, bilingual and trilingual children.

For detailed and updated information about her research outputs, knowledge transfer activities, student supervision plans and actionable recommendations for multilingual parents, visit her personal website (https://maiziyin.com/).

1. Child language acquisition involving Mandarin, Cantonese and/or English:
   -Monolingual acquisition of Mandarin or Cantonese; input, cross-linguistic interaction and code-mixing in simultaneous and sequential development of Chinese languages alongside English
   
   
2. Heritage Chinese in overseas communities:
   -Early development, ultimate attainment and attrition of heritage L1 Chinese across the life span; shift of language dominance during adolescence
   
   
3. Adult language acquisition:
   -Representation and processing of the lexicon and syntactic structures in L2 Chinese; L3 acquisition of French and German

• LING3204 Second Language Acquisition

• LING3206 Bilingualism

• LING5201 Topics in Second Language Acquisition

• LING5503 Topics in Chinese Language Acquisition