News Date:
CityUHK LT is excited to share that Prof. Charles Bond Chang from our department (Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong) has received the Early Career Contribution Award, the 2026 Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Science for his influential research on bilingual speech, linguistics, phonetics, and language development.
The Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded to Professor Brian MacWhinney in recognition of his pioneering and sustained contributions to the field through integrative research spanning psycholinguistics, corpus and computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, and systems theory. Together, the 2026 laureates have made significant contributions with far-reaching impact on language science research worldwide.
Professor Charles B. Chang is Professor of Linguistics whose research focuses on phonetics, phonology, and language acquisition, with particular emphasis on bilingualism and multilingualism. He is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the Linguistic Society of America and has been elected a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society.
Professor Chang’s principal contribution to language science lies in his pioneering research on bilingual speech. Through meticulous experimental phonetic analyses, he has demonstrated that a speaker’s first language can change under the influence of a second language within a relatively short period of time. This work shows the malleability of the first language as a consequence of bilingualism and directly challenges long‑standing assumptions that the native language is biologically ‘anchored’ after childhood or adolescence. His research has contributed greatly to a breakthrough in language science at the international level by facilitating a paradigm shift in how the first language is understood—not as a fixed end‑product, but as a dynamic process that continues to evolve across the lifespan.
Building on this foundational insight, Professor Chang continues to investigate the factors that drive language change when multiple languages interact in the bilingual and multilingual mind. His research has advanced understanding of cross‑linguistic influence, heritage language speech, and the dynamic nature of multilingual sound systems and has helped reshape theoretical and empirical approaches to language development, attrition, and change.
In addition to his research achievements, Professor Chang plays an active leadership role in the field and has contributed extensively through editorial service, leadership roles in major international conferences, and the mentorship of graduate students and junior researchers.
Professor Chang receives the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Science for his outstanding early‑career contributions to the study of bilingual speech and language development and for his demonstrated leadership and international impact in advancing language science.
-Source news: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/.../2026-yuen-ren-chao-prize-in.../
-Chao Prize information: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/fh/chao-prize/?lang=en
