As a branch of cognitive science, cognitive science of language is a new field of interdisciplinary research on language acquisition and cognition. Relying on our existing international and domestic researchers, our Center concentrates on cutting-edge areas of international academic development and serves China’s national goals; it mainly conducts research studies in three areas surrounding “Chinese language acquisition, cognition, and brain science”.

(1) Chinese language acquisition and cognitive neuroscience research. This area mainly focuses on second language acquisition of Chinese, including research on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying bilingual and multilingual acquisition. It aims to develop a “Bilingual Brain Imaging Resource Repository” for researching bilingual acquisition of native and second languages among international students with different first language backgrounds. It also aims to examine the mechanisms underlying accent fossilization involved in Chinese language acquisition among international learners, based on which we plan to conduct research on foreign accent and regional identity recognition and identification by means of artificial neural network and deep-learning technologies.

(2) Language impairment and pathological linguistics research. This area mainly concentrates on the pathological mechanism underlying speech and language impairment involved in child language acquisition, as well as on speech and language rehabilitation. Research studies in this area focus on the screening, diagnosing, assessment, and rehabilitation for children’s speech and hearing impairment, developmental and acquired language disorder, aphasia, and autism. This area mainly takes a biological perspective to explore the biological properties of the language acquisition faculty in native Chinese speakers, the language acquisition mechanism of such speakers, and the mechanism involved in decreased brain function in older adults. Taking a crosslinguistic and comparative perspective, we plan to explore the structure of the left periphery and to compile an atlas of human language structures, which would allow us to observe the order by which various syntactic functions develop or degrade in human brain and cognition.

(3) Biolinguistics research. With different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, the three aforementioned research areas all contribute to our understanding of language cognition and brain science. We expect to report breakthroughs and innovations in these areas as a result of collaborations between our international and domestic researchers supported by our Center