I am a developmental psycholinguist and a speech therapist, with expertise in studying child language development and disorders. I study child first and second language acquisition in cross-linguistic and multi-lingual contexts, so far involving Cantonese, Mandarin, English, German, Urdu, Hindi, and Kam. My interests include cognitive linguistic, typological-functional and processing approaches to the study of language acquisition and disorders, clinical linguistics, developing language assessment and intervention approaches for children in a Chinese and multilingual context, and promoting acquisition research on Chinese languages.

Language impairments that emerge during development in the absence of other biomedical, physical, and intellectual conditions are known as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD, formerly called “Specific Language Disorder”). This specific language learning disability is of important impact to wellness in academic outcomes, mental health and career development of an individual. DLD impacts 2 children in every class of 30 and is more common than Autism. DLD emerges in childhood and can persist into adulthood if undiagnosed and untreated. In addition to DLD, when one also considers language disorders associated with biomedical conditions, such as Autism, the prevalence rate of language disorders in children would be even higher.

Despite the global prevalence of children acquiring Chinese languages, improving the identification of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and developing evidence-based language intervention for multilingual Chinese-speaking children with language needs have been an important area largely lacking assessment tools and evidence-based intervention in international academia at large. This has been a major line of research, I, as a multilingual in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, aspire to develop in recent years and in the near future. Below I describe two specific directions of my latest research interests and related plans.