Minqi Liu

Hi! I’m a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA and also a member of UCLA Language Acquisition Lab. My research centers on children’s acquisition of syntax in their first languages. My current experimental work concerns how children acquire the linguistic constructions that involve syntactic movements of a noun phrase over an existing noun phrase, which usually cause difficulty (Intervention Effects) in child languages.

I work extensively on the syntax and acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. I have also performed descriptive research on San Cristóbal Lachirioag Zapotec, an underdocumented language spoken in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. Before entering the PhD program at UCLA, I earned my B.A. in Chinese Linguistics at Peking University, China.

Please see my CV for more research and teaching experiences.

Research Interests: first language acquisition, syntax

Recent News:

• I received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for my dissertation project Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Passives with faculty PI Professor Nina Hyams.
• I presented my poster titled Prevalence of long passives in child Mandarin: Input and intervention effects at the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 46) and the 96th LSA Annual Meeting.
• I gave a talk on Rethinking Raising vs. Control Analyses in Mandarin bei-Passives at the 33rd meeting of the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-33).
• I presented a poster on Adverbial Clitics in San Cristóbal Lachirioag Zapotec at the 2021 Annual Meeting of Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA 2021).
• A paper co-authored by me, Nina Hyams, and Victoria Mateu is to be published in the inaugural issue of Tsinghua Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics, entitled The Syntax and Acquisition of Mandarin Sluice-like Constructions.