Virginia Yip | The Chinese University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)
Papers by Virginia Yip
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2021
Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literatur... more Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the bilingual child’s languages con-stitute separate systems. The past decade has witnessed an intense debate over whether the two linguistic systems, although separate in principle, may nevertheless interact. Yip and Matthews provide substantial empirical evidence in favour of this view, arguing that bilingual children develop differently from monolinguals. Moreover, they show that many developmental phenomena in bilingual data are paralleled by similar features in contact varieties, such as Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), and they argue that bilin-gual acquisition can have the effect of establishing substrate influence in a contact lan-guage. In particular, mutual influence occurring in bilingual development – so goes the hypothesis – provides one me...
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal ... more Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of overlapping areas without significant differences in neural signatures. This different pattern of findings led us to ask the question of where nouns and verbs of two different languages are represented in various areas in the brain in Chinese–English bilinguals. In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a lexical decision paradigm involving Chinese and English verbs and nouns to address this question. We found that while Chinese nouns and verbs involved activation of common brain areas, the processing of English verbs engaged many more regions than did the processing of English nouns. Specifically, compared to English nouns, English verb presentation was associated with stronger activation of the left putamen and c...
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an importa... more Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction ([(NP1)-ba-NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among heritage Mandarin children (n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in the UK. The results showed considerable similarities between the children and their parents in a number of key structural properties of the ba-construction. However, the children produced the ba-construction with reduced frequency and in a “heritage variety” with a reduced set of nominal and verbal phrases in NP2 and VP, which is not attested in a group of age-matched Mandarin speakers in Beijing. Additionally, higher frequency of the ba-construction in the heritage children’s production is associated with greater lexical diversity, rather than higher frequency of the ba-construction, in their parental input. We lay out positive ...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences wi... more This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive accentuation in English sentences. Results show that accentuation played little role in Cantonese learners’ comprehension of focus, whereas it affected how accurately and quickly Dutch learners and native controls comprehended focus. Dutch learners were even more efficient than native controls in comprehending focus-to-accentuation mapping. Furthermore, both L2 groups could successfully perceive accentuation in English sentences. These findings suggest that multiple interfaces might not be equally problematic for L2 learners with different L1s, and convergence at multiple interfaces in L2 is possible. The comprehension difficulty observed in Cantonese learners c...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with differen... more This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, inp...
Linguistics
This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English biling... more This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still s...
Journal of child language, Jan 15, 2018
This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpre... more This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study using modified forced choice, video choice, and elicited production techniques with five groups of children (two- to six-year-olds) and an adult control group. Three-year-olds were sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, suggesting guidance from principles of aspect shift and subevent modification. On the other hand, distributional properties of the input play a role in acquiring the interpretation and word order of zai: e.g., four-year-olds significantly differed from adults in accepting non-target V-zai sentences, as some verb classes can take postverbal prepositional phrases with zai while others cannot...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-... more Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.Abstract:
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2021
Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literatur... more Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the bilingual child’s languages con-stitute separate systems. The past decade has witnessed an intense debate over whether the two linguistic systems, although separate in principle, may nevertheless interact. Yip and Matthews provide substantial empirical evidence in favour of this view, arguing that bilingual children develop differently from monolinguals. Moreover, they show that many developmental phenomena in bilingual data are paralleled by similar features in contact varieties, such as Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), and they argue that bilin-gual acquisition can have the effect of establishing substrate influence in a contact lan-guage. In particular, mutual influence occurring in bilingual development – so goes the hypothesis – provides one me...
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal ... more Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of overlapping areas without significant differences in neural signatures. This different pattern of findings led us to ask the question of where nouns and verbs of two different languages are represented in various areas in the brain in Chinese–English bilinguals. In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a lexical decision paradigm involving Chinese and English verbs and nouns to address this question. We found that while Chinese nouns and verbs involved activation of common brain areas, the processing of English verbs engaged many more regions than did the processing of English nouns. Specifically, compared to English nouns, English verb presentation was associated with stronger activation of the left putamen and c...
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an importa... more Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction ([(NP1)-ba-NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among heritage Mandarin children (n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in the UK. The results showed considerable similarities between the children and their parents in a number of key structural properties of the ba-construction. However, the children produced the ba-construction with reduced frequency and in a “heritage variety” with a reduced set of nominal and verbal phrases in NP2 and VP, which is not attested in a group of age-matched Mandarin speakers in Beijing. Additionally, higher frequency of the ba-construction in the heritage children’s production is associated with greater lexical diversity, rather than higher frequency of the ba-construction, in their parental input. We lay out positive ...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences wi... more This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive accentuation in English sentences. Results show that accentuation played little role in Cantonese learners’ comprehension of focus, whereas it affected how accurately and quickly Dutch learners and native controls comprehended focus. Dutch learners were even more efficient than native controls in comprehending focus-to-accentuation mapping. Furthermore, both L2 groups could successfully perceive accentuation in English sentences. These findings suggest that multiple interfaces might not be equally problematic for L2 learners with different L1s, and convergence at multiple interfaces in L2 is possible. The comprehension difficulty observed in Cantonese learners c...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with differen... more This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, inp...
Linguistics
This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English biling... more This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still s...
Journal of child language, Jan 15, 2018
This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpre... more This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study using modified forced choice, video choice, and elicited production techniques with five groups of children (two- to six-year-olds) and an adult control group. Three-year-olds were sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, suggesting guidance from principles of aspect shift and subevent modification. On the other hand, distributional properties of the input play a role in acquiring the interpretation and word order of zai: e.g., four-year-olds significantly differed from adults in accepting non-target V-zai sentences, as some verb classes can take postverbal prepositional phrases with zai while others cannot...
Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-... more Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.Abstract: