PRESENTATIONS
Public lecture,
Invited talks,
Conference presentations
Public lecture
Lei, Margaret. 2018. 粵語兒童的語言發展 [Language development in Cantonese-speaking children]. Public lecture delivered at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Public Humanities Lectures, September 9, Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong. [link]
Keynote and invited talks
2024
Lei, Margaret. 2024. The acquisition of universal quantification by first and second language learners of Cantonese. Invited talk given at Comparative Syntax, Semantics, and Language Acquisition Workshop (CSLA) #14, March 14, Centre for Linguistics, Nanzan University, Japan (online).
Lei, Margaret. 2024. 粵疑粵問 [Curious Cantonese questions]. Invited talk given at the Cantonese Evening of New Asia College Language and Culture Programmes 2023/24, March 12, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
2023
Lei, Margaret. 2023. 粵語外來詞的興衰 [Rise and decline of loanwords in Cantonese]. Invited talk given the Cantonese Evening of New Asia College Language and Culture Programmes 2022/23, November 23, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lei, Margaret. 2023. 穿粵新詞舊語 [Crossing old and new Cantonese]. Invited talk given at the Cantonese Evening of New Asia College Language and Culture Programmes 2022/23, March 29, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
2021
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak, Margaret Lei and Jialei Zhu. 2021. The comprehension of interrogatives by Shanghainese-speaking children: Competing grammars in acquisition. Invited lecture given at the Third International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics (ICTEAP-3), November 20-21, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan (virtual meeting).
2019
Lei, Margaret. 2019. Research methods in linguistics: Illustration from studies of language acquisition, language use, and language structure. Invited lecture given at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, December 24, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Lei, Margaret. 2019. The acquisition of quantificational structures and numerals: A cross-linguistic comparison of Chinese and English. Invited lecture given at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, December 23, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Lei, Margaret. 2019. First language acquisition of Cantonese and Mandarin. Seminar for MA students, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, November 1, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Lei. 2019. Verb suffix as universal quantifier: The logical properties of saai3 revisited. Invited lecture given at the International Workshop on Cantonese Syntax (IWCS), June 27-28, Palacký University, Olomouc, The Czech Republic.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Lei. 2019. The acquisition of A-quantifiers: Insights from Cantonese. Invited lecture given at the Second International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics (ICTEAP-2), March 16-17, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
2018
Zhu, Jialei, Thomas Hun-tak Lee and Margaret Lei. 2018. 上海話兒童的句法獲得 [The acquisition of syntax by Shanghainese-speaking children]. Invited lecture given at the Young Linguists Salon, Department of Chinese, Fudan University, June 13, Shanghai, China.
2017
Lei, Margaret. 2017. The acquisition of A-quantification in Cantonese. Thesis awardee report given at the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong 2017 Outstanding Thesis Award Presentation Ceremony held at the 2017 Annual Research Forum, December 2, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.
Zhu, Jialei, Thomas Hun-tak Lee and Margaret Lei. 2017. 上海話兒童的語言發展 -- 一項基本語序的調查 [The early grammar of Shanghainese-speaking children: Observations on word order]. Invited lecture given at the Workshop on Language Acquisition and Linguistic Representations, August 26, Linyi University, Shandong, China.
2015
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2015. The acquisition of quantifier domain restriction by Cantonese-speaking children: The case of the universal quantifier verb suffix. Invited lecture given at the 23rd Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-23), August 26-28, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2015. Scope (dis)ambiguity in Chinese datives: The view from language acquisition. Invited lecture given at the East Asian Language Acquisition Workshop, held in conjunction with the 2015 International Conference on Language Form and Function, March 27, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
2014
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2014. Scope (dis)ambiguity in Chinese datives: The view from language acquisition. Invited lecture given at the 2014 Korean Society for Language and Information Workshop on Meaning and Cognition, June 20, Seoul National University, Korea.
2013
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2013. Scope (dis)ambiguity in prepositional and double object datives in Chinese: An experimental study. Keynote lecture given at the International Symposium on Quantification in Chinese: Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition, November 13-15, Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China.
2011
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2011. Acquisition of the postverbal universal quantifier affix in Cantonese. Invited lecture given at the 36th Colloquium, Centre for Linguistics, Nanzan University, March 5, Japan.
Conference presentations
2023
Lei, Margaret. 2023. Learning language-specific features in second language acquisition. Poster presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2023), January 5-8, Denver, Colorado, USA (virtual presentation).
2022
Kwan, Ivy and Margaret Lei. 2022. Variation in the syntactic change of Cantonese neutral questions. Paper presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation - Asia Pacific 7 (NWAV-AP7), December 14-16, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (virtual presentation).
Huang, Zhixian and Margaret Lei. 2022. Disambiguating Ji in Mandarin: Insights from child language. Paper to be presented at the Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Forum 5 (BEAL Forum 5), October 28, The Ohio State University, USA (virtual meeting).
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak, Margaret Lei and Jialei Zhu. 2022. The comprehension of interrogatives by Shanghainese-speaking children: A study on native language acquisition in a dialectal region. Paper presented at the Second Wu Colloquium, September 16-17, Fudan University, Shanghai, China (virtual meeting).
2021
Lei, Margaret. 2021. Acquisition of event culmination in the Chinese languages. Poster presented at the 15th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL-15), July 15-25, virtual meeting.
Lei, Margaret. 2021. Different paths to quantifier and numeral acquisition. Poster presented at the 2021 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting (SRCD 2021), April 7-9, virtual meeting.
2020
Tong, Suet Hin and Margaret Lei. 2020. An experimental investigation on domain restriction of the adverb sin1 in Cantonese. Paper presented at the Annual Research Forum (ARF) of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, December 11-12, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (virtual meeting).
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Lei. 2020. 粵語兒童的早期語序 [Word order in early child Cantonese]. Paper presented at the 20th Workshop on Cantonese (WOC-20), June 6, Hong Kong Baptist University (virtual meeting).
2019
Yang, Charles, Margaret Lei, and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2019. Language shapes children’s understanding of number. Paper presented at the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD-44), November 7-10, Boston University, USA.
Lei, Margaret. 2019. Children’s understanding of non-culminating accomplishments in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 14th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference (GALA-14), September 12-14, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
Lei, Margaret. 2019. Children’s knowledge of event culmination in Mandarin Chinese. Poster presented at the 2019 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting (SRCD 2019), March 21-23, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Lei, Margaret. 2019. Children’s acquisition of domain restriction in pre-verbal and post-verbal universal A-quantifiers. Paper presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2019), January 3-6, New York, USA.
2018
Lei, Margaret. 2018. The acquisition of cardinal and ordinal numbers in Cantonese. Poster presented at the 43rd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD-43), November 2-4, Boston University, USA.
Zhu, Jialei and Margaret Lei. 2018. Code-mixing in Shanghainese-speaking two-year-olds. Paper presented at the 26th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-26) and the 20th International Conference on Chinese Language and Culture (ICCLC-20), May 4-6, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
2017
Lei, Margaret. 2017. Children’s knowledge of domain restriction: The case of dōu (‘all’) in Mandarin Chinese. Poster (paper alternate) presented at the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD-42), November 3-5, Boston University, USA.
Zhu, Jialei, Thomas Hun-tak Lee and Margaret Lei. 2017. The early grammar of Shanghainese-speaking children: Observations on word order. Paper presented at the 25th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-25), June 25-27, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Lei, Margaret. 2017. Aspect and quantification in child Cantonese: The referential effects of verbal affixes in children’s production. Poster presented at the First International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics, March 10-12, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
2016
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2016. Cantonese suffix saai3 as a generalized distributivity operator: Arguments for an event-based approach. Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Formal Linguistics, December 3-4, Nankai University, Tianjin, China.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2016. Early knowledge of the interaction between aspect and quantification: Evidence from child Cantonese. Paper presented at the 41st Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD-41), November 4-6, Boston University, USA.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2016. An experimental study on a syntactic change in progress in Cantonese: The relationship between language change and language acquisition. Paper presented at the Fourth Meeting of the New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Asia-Pacific conference (NWAV-AP4), April 22-24, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan.
2015
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2015. 從使用頻率和句子接受程度來看香港粵語的句法演變 [Syntactic change in Hong Kong Cantonese: The views from frequency of usage and degree of sentence acceptability]. Paper presented at the 20th International Conference on Yue Dialects, December 11-12, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2015. Differentiating universal quantification from perfectivity: Cantonese-speaking children’s command of the affixal quantifier saai3. Paper presented at the Workshop on Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification, October 16-17, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2015. An experimental study on an ongoing syntactic change in Hong Kong Cantonese: Nominalizer insertion in sortal-classifier contexts. Paper presented at the 9th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-9), September 24-26, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.
2014
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2014. Domain selection in the acquisition of Cantonese universal A-quantifiers. Paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Formal Linguistics in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Acquisition, Language Disorder and Language Assessment, November 8-9, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2014. Scope interaction of universal A-quantifiers and negation: An experimental study on Cantonese-speaking children. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-22) and the 26th Annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-26), May 2-4, University of Maryland, College Park, USA.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2014. Nominalizer insertion in Hong Kong Cantonese: Is it a real syntactic change?. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-22) and the 26th Annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-26), May 2-4, University of Maryland, College Park, USA.
2013
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2013. Ge3-insertion in Hong Kong Cantonese: The view from de-insertion in Mandarin. Paper presented at the 18th International Conference on Yue Dialects, December 7-8, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2013. Chinese children's interpretation of scope in prepositional datives. Paper presented at the 8th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-8), September 26-28, EHESS, Paris, France.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2013. Scope interpretation of the dative construction by adult Mandarin speakers. Paper presented at the 25th Annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-25), June 21-23, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2013. Children’s early comprehension of the universal quantifier affix saai3 in Cantonese. Paper presented at the 21st Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-21), June 7-9, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2013. The semantic properties of saai3 in quantifying nominals and predicates: How it differs from aspectual and phase markers. Paper presented at the Thirteenth Workshop on Cantonese (WOC-13), March 16, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.
2012
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2012. Children’s comprehension of the direction of quantification of the A-quantifier saai3 in Cantonese. Paper presented at the CUHK-Nankai Workshop on Language Documentation and Language Acquisition, August 21-22, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Wong, Hok Yuen and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2012. 兩種香港常見鳥類的鳴聲特徵--來自校園的田野報告 [Characteristics of the vocalizations of two common bird species in Hong Kong: A field report from CUHK campus]. Paper presented at the CUHK-Nankai Workshop on Language Documentation and Language Acquisition, August 21-22, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
2011
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2011. Acquisition of the postverbal universal quantifier affix in Cantonese. Paper presented at the 7th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistic (EACL-7), September 13-15, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan and Thomas Hun-tak Lee. 2011. Cantonese-speaking children’s comprehension of deictic locatives. Poster presented at the 12th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), July 19-23, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada.
2010
Lee, Thomas Hun-tak and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2010. Acquisition of the postverbal universal quantifier affix in Cantonese. Paper presented at the Workshop on Acquisition of Scope and Phrase Structure: Comparative Perspectives, December 22-23, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
2009
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan, Thomas Hun-tak Lee, Joey Li, Josie Li, and Jessie Poon. 2009. Orthographic representation and transcription of code-mixing in the HKCELA corpus. Paper presented at the Workshop on Milestones in the First Language Acquisition of Chinese, December 28-29, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
2007
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan. 2007. Discrimination of level tones in Cantonese-learning infants. Poster presented at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-16), August 6-10, Saarbrücken, Germany.
2006
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan. 2006. Tone discrimination in infants acquiring a tonal language. Paper presented at the 15th Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS-15), June 19-23, Kyoto, Japan.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan. 2006. A phonetic study on the acquisition of Cantonese tones. Paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL-2), April 27-29, Université de La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France.
Lei, Margaret Ka-yan. 2006. The discrimination of Cantonese tones in infants. Paper presented at the 4th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-4), January 20-22, Budapest, Hungary.
Wong, Ying Wai and Margaret ka-yan Lei. 2006. Tone production phenomena in Cantonese. Paper presented at the 4th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-4), January 20-22, Budapest, Hungary.
2004
Yap, Foong Ha, Yi Heng Chan, Yumi Inoue, Ying Wai Wong and Margaret Ka-yan Lei. 2004. Are perfectives processed faster than imperfectives? Some preliminary findings from East Asian languages. Paper presented at Linguistics Annual Research Forum, December 11- 12, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.