I am a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and I am about to obtain my PhD degree soon. When I look back at the footprints left behind me, I realize that the most important thing which has motivated me to reach where I am now is curiosity.
My journey in linguistics starts at Fudan University in Shanghai. An undergraduate course in Chinese Dialectology first aroused my curiosity about languages. At the end of this course, I participated in a fieldtrip to Longquan, Zhejiang Province, where I had a chance to practice the phonetic transcription skills that I had learned in class. The great difficulty accompanied by a sense of achievement in transcribing the informant’s speech is still vivid in my mind even today. When I graduated from Fudan University, many of my classmates found a job in newspaper offices, whereas I was determined to pursue further studies in linguistics at HKUST. As an MPhil student at HKUST, my research interest was directed to phonetics and phonology. In addition to my specialized area, I always kept my mind open and attended a wide range of interesting talks. Among many fascinating talks, a talk about language and brain delivered by Prof. William Shi-Yuan Wang inspired me so much that I decided to approach him for a PhD position in his lab. My curiosity about how language works in the brain probably impressed him – later I had the great honor to study with Prof. Wang on lexical tones and their underlying neural signature in this department.
With great honor, I was awarded the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship in 2010. During the past three and a half years in my PhD study, I have received intensive training in theoretical linguistics, which was challenging initially, but turned out to be useful and rewarding. In particular, the training in this department has consolidated my knowledge in general linguistics, nicely complementing my prior background in empirical approaches. Thanks to the recommendation by Prof. Virginia Yip and Prof. Thomas Lee, I was selected in the 2012-2013 RGC-Fulbright Hong Kong Junior Research Scholar Program, which supported a six-month visit to the Haskins Laboratories affiliated with Yale University. I have established productive collaborations with many speech scientists at Haskins during my visit.
My journey in linguistic studies so far has been both fruitful and rewarding. I have learned that good research always leads one to enquire deeper and deeper into a question. The more I discover, the more new questions emerge. Curiosity and the excitement of discovering what is yet unknown, has motivated me to explore many interesting aspects of language, and will continue to guide me to make more achievements in the future. I would like to end my sharing with a poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), which was cited at the end of Prof. Wang’s new book, Yuyan, Yanhua yu Danao [Language, Evolution and Brain].
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-- A poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963),
cited in Wang (2012), Yuyan, Yanhua yu Danao.