The International Conference on Bilingualism and Comparative Linguistics, organized by the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, and co-organized by the Research Institute for the Humanities, was held on campus from 15 to 16 May. Six keynote speakers and three invited speakers across different fields gave presentations. The conference also featured three invited panels: (1) bilingualism and the brain, (2) the phonetics and phonology of language in context, and (3) learner corpora of modern languages and third language acquisition which featured the University’s effort to construct the first learner corpora where learners' first and second languages are Cantonese and English respectively, and the target languages are Spanish and Korean.

On 16 May, two keynote speakers at the conference, Prof. William Labov and Prof. William S.Y. Wang, joined A Dialogue on Sound Change: Past, Present and Future organized by the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Language Acquisition Laboratory. The two scholars engaged in an extended dialogue, exchanging their views on theories of sound change and lexical diffusion, with the hindsight of 40 years of empirical research on these topics.