Yip, Virginia Choy-yin

Professor

B.A., M.A. (Texas), M.A., Ph.D. (Southern Calif.)

3/F., Fung King Hey Building,

Main Campus,

The Chinese University of Hong Kong,

Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Tel: 2609-7019 Fax: 2603-7755

vcymatthews@cuhk.edu.hk

 

Research interests:

Bilingual development of Hong Kong children; Cantonese and comparative Sinitic grammar; Second language acquisition and grammatical theory.

Conference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood

Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre

Recent news release on bilingual projects:

An interview featuring the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre in IASCL - Child Language Bulletin - Vol 29, No 1: June 2009.

Research Frontiers: Newsletter of Research Grants Council of Hong Kong
(in English/ traditional Chinese character 繁體/ simplified Chinese character 简体)

Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Media Relations

Article in The University of Hong Kong's BULLETIN

Article in Hong Kong Economic Times (香港經濟日報), 4 September 2006

Honors and Awards:

CUHK Research Excellence Award 2006-2007

Leonard Bloomfield Book Award: http://lsadc.org/info/res-news.cfm
"The Linguistic Society of America announces the 2009 recipient of the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. The winning book is chosen by a three-
member committee from among works submitted to the LSA for consideration. The award will be presented at the LSA's business meeting on
January 9, 2009 in San Francisco, California.

The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact, by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, presents interesting new data and insightful
analyses of bilingual development. Based on the most extensive bilingual corpus yet assembled and drawing on both generative and typological
theoretical perspectives, the authors provide an extensive, informed and data-rich treatment of a difficult problem. The book sets a new standard
for the study of childhood bilingualism, and shows how this study bears on many different areas of linguistics, including monolingual acquisition,
language contact, syntactic theory, typology, and historical linguistics."

Professional Membership and Service:

Senior Centre Fellow and Member of the Advisory Committee, Research Centre into Language Education and Acquisition in Multilingual Societies (RCLEAMS) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education
Member: Linguistic Society of America, Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, International Association of Chinese Linguistics
Editorial board: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (published by Cambridge University Press), Second Language Research (published by Sage)

Representative publications:

Books:

Yip, V. & S. Matthews. In Preparation. Bilingual Development Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2007. The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [book website]
Reviews of Yip and Matthews(2007) include the following:
Bybell, A. 2007. A Twist on Multiple Language Acquisition (Amazon.com)
Francis, N. 2008.Journal of Child Language 35: 917-922.
Myers-Scotton, C. 2008. Journal of Linguistics 44: 791-796.
Logan-Terry, A. 2009 Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31: 507-508.
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge. (eBook is available) See online review by Blaine Erickson
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge.  (eBook is available) See review by Fang Yew-Jin (2001). Asian Studies Review 25.3.379-381.
Yip, V. 1995. Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reviews of Yip (1995) include the following:
Yuan Boping (1997)Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 19.4:513-514.
Wolfgang Kuhlwein (1999) International Review of Applied Linguistics in LanguageTeaching 37.4:321-327.
Matthews, S & V. Yip. 1994. Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
(eBook is available)
The Japanese translation of Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar by Matthews and Yip(London: Routledge1994) is translated by Eiichi Chishima and Shin Kataoka 2000
Reviews of Matthews and Yip (1994) include the following :
Samuel H-N. Cheung (1996) International Review of Chinese Linguistics Vol.1.1:129-133
Alain Peyraube (1996) International Review of chinese Linguistics Vol. 1.1.: 126-128 [in French]
Hugh Baker (1996) School of Oriental and African Studies Bulletin pp. 182-184.
Gisela Bruche-Schulz (1996) Cahiers de Lingusitique-Asie Orientale 25:135-157.
JeroenWiedenhof (1996) Glot International Vol.2.3:19.
Marjorie Chan (1998) Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association Vol.33.3:97-106. (online review by Marjorie Chan)

Journal Articles & Book Chapters:

Matthews, S. and V. Yip. 2009. Contact-induced grammaticalization: evidence from bilingual acquisition. Studies in Language 33:2, 366-395
Matthews, S. and V. Yip. 2008. Passive, unaccusative and pretransitive constructions in Chaozhou. In Djamouri, R., B.
Meisterernst and R. Sybesma (eds). Chinese Linguistics in Leipzig, pp.163-174. Centre de Recherches Linguistiques
sur l'Asie Orientale, Paris.
Chan, A.H.D., Luke, K.K., P. Li, Yip, V., Li, G.., Weekes, B., & Tan, L.H. 2008. Neural correlates of nouns and verbs
in early bilinguals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1145: 30-40
Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2007. Relative Clauses in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children: Typological Challenges and
Processing Motivations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29: 277-300
Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2006. Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: a case for mean length utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly. 3(2), 97–116
Matthews, S., Xu H-L. and V. Yip. 2005. Passive and unaccusative in the Jieyang dialect of Chaozhou. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 14: 267-298.
Yip, V. and S. Matthews. 2005. Dual input and learnability: null objects in Cantonese-English bilingual children. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, 2421-2431. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gu Y. and V. Yip. 2004. On the Cantonese resultative predicate V-can. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 30.2.35-67.
Yip, V. 2006. Early bilingual acquisition in the Chinese context. In Li P., L-H .Tan, E. Bates & O. Tzeng. (eds.) Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Vol.1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 148-162.
Chan, A.H.D., Liu, H.L., Yip, V., Fox, P.T., Gao, J.H., & Tan, L.H. 2004. Neural systems for word meaning modulated by semantic ambiguity. NeuroImage, 22, 1128-1133.
Yip, V. 2004. 粵英雙語兒童早期的語法發展《當代語言學》第一期, 1-18 頁.
“Early syntactic development in Cantonese-English bilingual children” Contemporary Linguistics 6.1.1-18.
Matthews, S. & V. Yip. 2002. "Relative Clauses in Early Bilingual Development: Transfer and Universals," in A. Giacalone (ed.), Typology and Second Language Acquisition. Mouton de Gruyter.
See
online review of the book by Malcolm Finney
Matthews, S.& V. Yip. 2001. "The Structure and Stratification of Relative Clauses in Contemporary Cantonese," in H. Chappell (ed.), Sinitic Grammar:Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 266-281.
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2000."Syntactic Transfer in a Cantonese-English Bilingual Child" Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3.3.193-208
Yip, V. & G. Tang. 1998. "Acquisition of English Reflexive Binding by Cantonese Learners: testing the positive transfer hypothesis," in M-L. Beck (ed.), Morphology and its Interfaces in Second Language Knowledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matthews, S & V. Yip. 1998. "Verb-copying Constructions in Cantonese," in B. T'sou (ed.),
Studia Linguistica Serica
. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong.
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 1995. "I-Interlanguage and typology," in L. Eubank et al (eds.),
The Current State of Interlanguage
. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Yip, V. 1994. "Consciousness-raising and Learnability," in T.Odlin (ed.),Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Keynote Speeches:

Yip, V. 2007. The logical problem of bilingual acquisition. Keynote speech delivered at the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB6), University of Hamburg, Germany. May 30- June 2.
Yip, V. 2004. "Bilingual Child Language Acquisition." Keynote speech delivered at the First National Symposium on Second Language Acquisition at the Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, 5-6 January . (handout available)

Yip, V. 2002. "Early Syntactic Development in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children." (available in Chinese and English)
Keynote speech delivered at the 9th International Symposium on Contemporary Linguistics in China, Beijing Foreign Studies University, PRC. 

 

 

 

RGC-funded Projects:

From Lexicon to Syntax in Childhood Bilingualism 2008-2011
PI: Virginia Yip (CUHK), Co-I: Stephen Matthews (HKU) and Li Ping (Pennsylvania State University)
Childhood Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition in Hong Kong Children: 2005-2006, RGC Ref. No. CUHK4692/05H
PI: Virginia Yip(CUHK) Co-I: Stephen Matthews(HKU), Yasuhiro Shirai(Cornell University).
Parsing Principles and Constituent Order in Cantonese : 2004-2006, RGC Ref. No. 7258/04H
PI: Stephen Matthews(HKU) Co-I: Elaine Francis (Purdue), Conrad Perry(HKU) and V. Yip (CUHK).
Cognitive and Brain Processing of the Chinese Language, RGC Central Allocation: 2003-2006
PI: Li-Hai Tan (HKU) Co-I: C. Perry (HKU), J. Spinks (HKU), G. Shen (UT San Antonio), V. Yip (CUHK) & P. Fox (UT San Antonio).
Multimedia Perspectives On Bilingual Development, 2002-05
  PI:V. Yip Co-I: S. Matthews
Universals and Specifics in Reading Development: Speed of Processing, Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness, and Home Literacy Environment, 2001-03
  PI: Catherine McBride (CUHK) Co-Investigators: Hua Shu (Beijing Normal University), Richard K.Wagner (Florida State University) and V.Yip
A Cantonese-English Bilingual Child Language Corpus, 1997-2000
  PI: V.Yip, Co-I: S.Matthews (HKU)
The Min Dialect of Chaozhou and Comparative Chinese Grammar, 1996-98
  PI: S. Matthews (HKU),Co-I: V. Yip
The Development of Bilingual Competence in Hong Kong Children
  PI: S.Matthews(HKU),Co-I: V. Yip & Huang Yue-Yuan (HKBU)
The Development of Grammatical Competence in the Formal ESL Learning Environment 1992-94
  PI: V.Yip, Co-I: G.Tang
Studies in the Comparative Grammar of English and Cantonese,1992-96
  PI: S. Matthews(HKU),Co-I: V.Yip

 

Participation in Projects funded from other sources:

Computer-Aided Second Language Learning Through Speech-Based Human-Computer Interactions 2009-2011 (CUHK Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering in the area of Multimedia Technologies 2009)
PI: Helen Meng (CUHK, Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management)
Co-I: Pauline Lee (CUHK, Independent Learning Centre), Virginia Yip (CUHK, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages)
Language Differentiation in Bilingual Acquisition 2003-2004 (CUHK Direct Grant)
Syntactic Categories in Early Bilingual Development 2002-2003 (CUHK Direct Grant)
Education Towards Biliteracy and Trilingualism: An Internet Support Project funded by Quality Education Fund
Principal investigator: Kwan Tze-wan (Department of Philosophy, CUHK) Co-I:Virginia Yip (Department of MLC, CUHK),Chiang Ying Ho (Department of Chinese Language and Literature)
Cyber Discourse: A Linguistic Study on Chat Room Language 2000-2001(CUHK Direct Grant)
Minority Languages in Yunnan 2000-2001(CUHK Direct Grant)
            

 

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