Virginia Yip
Encyclopedia
Virginia Yip, a linguist, is director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre
. She is currently a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
. Her research interests include bilingual language acquisition, second language acquisition
, Cantonese, Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar, psycholinguistics
, and cognitive science
.
at the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California
. She is the author of Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English (Benjamins) and co-author of a series of works on Cantonese grammar published by Routledge: Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (which has been translated into Japanese), Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese. She and her team have created the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, the first longitudinal bilingual corpus in which Cantonese is represented along with English, and the largest multimedia bilingual corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System
(CHILDES) based at Carnegie Mellon University
.
This database has already been the data source for several undergraduate and graduate dissertations in Hong Kong, and it is the basis of a book, The Bilingual Child, written by Yip and Matthews and published by Cambridge University Press
in 2007. The database focuses on children who are bilingual in English and Cantonese and who learned to speak two languages through the one-parent, one-language approach. Using that method, one parent speaks to the child in one language, and the other parent speaks to the child in another.
Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre
Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre is an academic organization of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.-Purpose:...
. She is currently a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Chinese University of Hong Kong is a research-led university in Hong Kong.CUHK is the only tertiary education institution in Hong Kong with Nobel Prize winners on its faculty, including Chen Ning Yang, James Mirrlees, Robert Alexander Mundell and Charles K. Kao...
. Her research interests include bilingual language acquisition, second language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
, Cantonese, Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar, psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
.
Biography
Virginia Yip received her B.A. in linguisticsLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
. She is the author of Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English (Benjamins) and co-author of a series of works on Cantonese grammar published by Routledge: Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (which has been translated into Japanese), Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese. She and her team have created the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, the first longitudinal bilingual corpus in which Cantonese is represented along with English, and the largest multimedia bilingual corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System
Childes
Childes may refer to:*Childe's Tomb , Dartmoor, England*CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System, a database of child language...
(CHILDES) based at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
.
The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus
The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, which is reported in 2005 as the world's largest video-linked database of children becoming bilingual, created by Yip, and her husband, Stephen Matthews from The University of Hong Kong — features 170 hours of audio and video files of four families raising their children bilingually in Cantonese and English. The project, which includes transcripts and searchable video and audio segments, took 10 years to compile.This database has already been the data source for several undergraduate and graduate dissertations in Hong Kong, and it is the basis of a book, The Bilingual Child, written by Yip and Matthews and published by Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
in 2007. The database focuses on children who are bilingual in English and Cantonese and who learned to speak two languages through the one-parent, one-language approach. Using that method, one parent speaks to the child in one language, and the other parent speaks to the child in another.
Honors and awards
- CUHK Research Excellence Award 2006-2007
- Leonard Bloomfield Book AwardLeonard Bloomfield Book AwardThe Leonard Bloomfield Book Award is presented by the Linguistic Society of America to the recently published book "which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics". From its establishment in 1992 through 2008 the award was made...
, Linguistic Society of AmericaLinguistic Society of AmericaThe Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
Books & Publications
- Matthews, S. & V. Yip. 1994. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. (on-line review by Marjorie Chan); Japanese edition by E. Chishima and S. Kataoka, Tokyo: Toho Shoten, 2000.
- Yip, V. 1995. Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews, 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge.
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews, 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge. (on-line review by Blaine Erickson)
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2007. The Bilingual Child: early development and language contact. Cambridge University Press.