About
Hello! 你好！
I am Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and Deputy Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). I am also a member of the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) at CUHK.
I studied Chinese, education and linguistics at Peking University (B.A., M.A.) and University of Cambridge (M.Phil., Ph.D.) and completed postdoctoral training in the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) at CUHK. Before taking up my current position in 2023, I was Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong (2020-2023), and prior to that, Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor at CUHK (2014-2020).
I have been the Principal Investigator (PI) of several longitudinal research projects investigating the dynamic and intricate relations between multilingual input and acquisition outcomes in infants, toddlers and preschoolers in the Greater Bay Area of China, funded by the Research Grants Council, HKSAR. I am serving on the Editorial Boards of Second Language Research, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and am currently Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. I regularly deliver seminar and workshop talks for parents, teachers and educators to promote evidence-based home language input planning and pedagogical interventions for monolingual, bilingual and trilingual children.
I was born and raised in Guangzhou (also known as “Canton”), China, and am an alumnus of the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University. I grew up speaking both Cantonese (Guangzhou) and Mandarin (Putonghua), and am mother of two trilingual boys.
Research profile 研究内容和方法
I am broadly interested in finding out how language input and cross-linguistic interaction, independently and collectively, shape the process and outcomes of child and adult language acquisition. We have been using combinations of corpus, experimental and statistical methods to predict and account for patterns of language learning and processing as well as features of child-directed speech in Mandarin, Cantonese and English speakers. Since last year, our team has ventured into adult third language acquisition involving German and French. Our postdocs, PhD students and research assistants work collaboratively and closely as a team to investigate language acquisition in diverse populations, contexts and linguistic domains.
In 2025-2026, one of the team’s priorities is to continue to work intensively on a number of linked projects on multilingual input and early language development from age 0 to 6 funded by the Research Grants Council, HKSAR: we will collect new speech samples from monolingual and bilingual siblings in Shenzhen and Hong Kong (GRF 2026-2028), and continue to report findings from two recently completed projects focusing on parents and their trilingual toddlers in Guangzhou and Hong Kong (GRF 2021-2024), and bilingual mothers and domestical helpers in Hong Kong (ECS 2023-2025).
We support Open Science/Scholarship, and have been sharing our data with the research community and the public through CHILDES (EACMC, CHCC, HKMECC, BJCMC) and other platforms. We value impactful research within and beyond the academia, and are looking for opportunities to collaborate with NGOs, educational bodies and industrial partners to disseminate and translate our research findings to benefit parents, teachers and the society.
Contact me
maggiezymai@cuhk.edu.hk
