William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Hong Gang Jin was invited to present a paper, “Cognition and Chinese Language Acquisition,” at the International Symposium on Chinese Linguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The May symposium was co-sponsored by University of Hawaii at Manoa and Peking University.
Jin discussed recent advancements in studies of cognition and second language acquisition (SLA). She said researchers have demonstrated “substantial empirical results in areas of second language processing, cross-linguistic transfer, L2 perception and attention analysis, roles of implicit and explicit L2 learning, and usage-based L2 learning among others.”
According to Jin, the findings “have pushed the field to take on a new view of SLA” and inspired “collaborative research in areas of corpus linguistic analysis, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic theories of the mental representation, emergentist view of dynamic system theory, and probabilistic and frequency-based theories of language.”
Jin applied these advancements to the study of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and demonstrated how CFL researchers can collaborate “with specialists in above-mentioned fields to form a dynamic platform where language, communication, and cognition interplay.”
