Speaker: ZHOU, Peng

Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University; Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University. A/P Zhou’s research interests are in the areas of linguistics and psycholinguistics. He has published 37 papers in international peer-reviewed journals or peer-reviewed books. He is now Associate Editor of the International Journal of English Linguistics, and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. He has been invited to peer review papers for 18 international refereed journals. He has been a grant and proposal reviewer for the Australian Research Council, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Czech Science Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, the Cambridge University Press, and the Springer. He has been a chief investigator on a national grant of China and an Australian national Grant.

Abstract: Acquiring a language involves mastery of several subsystems of language. These include the syntactic principles that govern how words are combined to form sentences; the semantic principles that determine how the meanings of words combine to form sentence meanings; the phonological principles underlying the sound patterns of a language; and the pragmatic norms that govern language use in conversation. Typically developing children manifest remarkable linguistic competence in all of these domains in just a few years. By four or five years of age, they have effectively become adults in their linguistic competence. By contrast, up to 19% of preschool children suffer from difficulties in acquiring language. In this talk, we discuss how children with autism understand language, and in particular, we focus on language development in Mandarin-speaking children with autism.