Professor Cheung Hin Tat received his Ph.D. in Child Language Doctoral Program from the University of Kansas. He has been investigating a wide range of issues in developmental psycholinguistics, including grammatical acquisition, language impairment and narrative development. For promoting research in first and second language acquistion, he and his associates have constructed two corpora: Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (http://lope.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/tccm/) and the LTTC English Learner Corpus (http://www.lttcelc.org.tw/). He is the founding head of the department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies and the founding director of the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Studies (http://www.eduhk.hk/crlls/).

Professor Cheung was previously the Director of the Audio-Visual Educational Center (2001-2006, now known as Foreign Language Teaching and Resource Center), the Director of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics (2007-2009) of National Taiwan University (NTU), and the President of the Linguistics Society of Taiwan (2007-2009). Between 1999 and 2011, he received the Excellence in Teaching Award for five times while serving as a faculty member of NTU.

Key Research Areas and projects

Prof Cheung’s research areas include first and second language acquisition, developmental language disorders, assessment of childhood language disorders, corpus-based language studies and childhood bilingualism.

His current projects are:

• Assessing speech and language disorders in Chinese children
• Measuring grammatical complexity in Chinese children
• The role of tonal cue in early word learning