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The Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (CBS) has a comprehensive research profile in language sciences and linguistics, with special foci on Chinese, bilingualism and Asian languages. We aim for research results that merit a world-leading profile and the potential to generate knowledge and applications that will benefit mankind in general.

Research Objectives

• To understand how language is used in context, in vivo, with special reference to meaning-making by bilingual speakers and writers in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Greater China.
• To apply our knowledge to language issues in Hong Kong, especially in relation to Chinese language and bilingual education.
• To train professionals and scholars who, upon successful completion of the postgraduate programme at CBS, can go on to play a crucial role in an increasingly competitive world characterised by multilingualism and multiculturalism.
• To build a solid scholarly foundation for the effective application of language use in the domains of business and education, such as in the fields of corporate communication, language technology, language education and language testing.

Research Direction

CBS strives to gain a world-leading reputation in empirical, inter­-disciplinary research in language sciences by (i) enhancing our research capacity in computational and corpus linguistics, neurolinguistics and cognitive sciences; (ii) expanding international collaboration; and (iii) nurturing young scholars by targeting competitive external grants and producing top-quality publications in high-impact journals.

Major Research Programme

Neurocognitive Studies of Language and Clinical Linguistics

Research areas range from ageing; amusia; communication disorders; developmental dyslexia; L2 pedagogical grammar; language acquisition; language variations; the creation and evaluation of learner tools; intercultural mediation; neurolinguistics (ERP, fMRI); psycholinguistics; reading (of characters and text); speech production and perception; the bilingual brain; the conversational brain; tonal production and perception; and clinical applications in speech therapy.