Prof. William S-Y. WANG, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

What is linguistics? (何為語言學). The 59^th lecture of the Xue’er Forum (學而大講堂第59講). School of Chinese Studies and Exchange, Shanghai International Studies University (上海外國語大學國際文化交流學院) (online), 9 September 2022.

Abstract
The development of language can be studied from two perspectives: one is phylogeny, ie. how human language emerged millions of years ago. I will address the issue why language emerged only with us, but not other animals like chimpanzees, which share many of our genes. The reason why language is unique to us is that in addition to the several biological functions upon which language is built, we also have a powerful brain. The other perspective is ontogeny, ie. the exploration of how infants acquire language and how elders’ language gets impaired or even lost. I will also discuss the difference between child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition. I will close the lecture with the imminent challenge of aging and mention some of the research my team is doing in Hong Kong.