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 | Biography |  |
Dr. Chang-Smith’s primary research interests fall into the areas of (1) first language acquisition, (2) simultaneous and subsequent bilingual language acquisition, (3) neurocognitive aspects of language acquisition, representation, processing and speech production, (4) Chinees psycholinguistics (5) grammatical constraints on bilingual code switching, (6) relations between linguistic and conceptual categorizations, and (7) Chinese and English syntax. Dr Chang-Smith is a language scientist, who has joined Queensland Brain Institute as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow since February 2009 to pursue research in psycho-linguistics and neuro-linguistics. She received her MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Queensland. She subsequently accepted an ANU Postgraduate Scholarship from the Australian National University to work on first language acquisition and bilingualism and obtained her PhD in Linguistics in 2005. Her PhD thesis, entitled "First Language Acquisition of Functional Categories in Mandarin Nominal Expressions: A Longitudinal Study of Two Mandarin Speaking Children" was the first in the field to utilise grammatical aspects of the Minimalist Program (Chomskian generative framework) to explain early child acquisition of functional categories in Mandarin Chinese.
Dr Chang-Smith has worked in a management capacity with the Center for Computational Molecular Science at The University of Queensland during its set-up phase (2003 to 2005) with responsibilities for strategic development, marketing and personnel. After the completion of her PhD, she has held a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University (May 2005 to April 2009) and was a visiting scholar at the Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism (SFB 538 Mehrsprachigkeit) at Hamburg University, Germany from April 2007 to January 2008.
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