Virginia Yip (葉彩燕), is a Hong Kong

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and writer. She is director of the

Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public university, public research university in Ma Liu Shui, Hong Kong, formally established in 1963 by a university charter, charter granted by the Legislative Council of Hong Kong. It is the t ...

. She is a professor at the

Chinese University of Hong Kong The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public research university in Ma Liu Shui, Hong Kong, formally established in 1963 by a charter granted by the Legislative Council of Hong Kong. It is the territory's second-oldest university an ...

. Her research interests include bilingual language acquisition,

second language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...

, Cantonese, Chaozhou and comparative Sinitic grammar,

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

, and cognitive science.

Biography

Virginia Yip received her

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

and her

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

. 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 The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it ...

) based at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. Yip is married to linguist Stephen Matthews from the

University of Hong Kong The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the fi ...

. They have three bilingual children: a son and two daughters.

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

— 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 is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing hou ...

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 Award The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

(2009),

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

Books and publications

*Matthews, Stephen. & Virginia 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, Virginia. 1995. Interlanguage and Learnability: from Chinese to English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. *Yip, Virginia. & Stephen Matthews, 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge. *Yip, Virginia. & Stephen Matthews, 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge.

by Blaine Erickson) *Yip, Virginia. & Stephen Matthews (馬詩帆), 2007. The Bilingual Child: early development and language contact (雙語兒童：早期發展與語言接觸). Cambridge University Press. :*Cai Ya Qing (蔡雅菁): The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact/雙語兒童：早期發展及語言接觸 (Mandarin Chinese translation). Beijing: Beijing World Publishing Corporation. *Stephen Matthews & Virginia Yip, 2011. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

References

External links

Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre HomepageConference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early ChildhoodThe Chinese Pidgin English featuring: Stephen Matthews(HKU) as colonial BritList of publications
(in Chinese) {{DEFAULTSORT:Yip, Virginia Living people Bilingualism and second-language acquisition researchers Developmental psycholinguists Hong Kong linguists Hong Kong women writers University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts alumni University of Southern California alumni 1962 births