Profile:

Yanyu was a Research Associate on Strand 5 of MEITS. Yanyu studied in Beijing from 2006 to 2013 and then completed her PhD at Cambridge. Her research interests lie in second language acquisition, with a focus on empirical studies of developmental and synchronic aspects of L2 acquisition in the generative approaches and cross-linguistic influence between languages. Her post-doc MEITS project examines the potential roles of age, typological differences and linguistic experience in the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese sentence final particles by English- and Cantonese- speaking learners who learn the language as a child/adult. This project involves both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Yanyu made a systematic comparison between sentence final-particles of Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese from the perspectives of phonology, semantics and syntax. She worked on the methodology design of pilot studies for this project and proposed to use both on-line and off-line instruments (i.e. a self-paced listening task, a performance imitation task, a sentence-picture matching task, and an acceptability judgement task) to elicit data. Once the design of experiment was completed, she collected data in the UK and China.