The GRF aims to supplement the eight UGC-funded universities’ own research support to researchers who have achieved or have the potential to achieve research excellence, while the ECS is intended to nurture junior academics and to prepare them for a career in education and research.

This year, the Faculty of Arts is delighted to announce that more than HK$11 million in funding has been awarded to 26 projects, marking the highest number of projects awarded in the past five years. This remarkable achievement is expected to further advance the dissemination of research and elevate its quality, reinforcing the Faculty’s impact within academia and beyond.

Among the awarded projects, Professor Pan Haihua from the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages received HK$984,000 for his project “How does semantic distance drive real-time sentence interpretation? A theoretical and neurocognitive approach to Chinese topic construction”, one of the highest grants within the Faculty this year. Prof. Pan’s project aims to understand how semantic relationships and syntactic restrictions influence sentence decoding in Chinese. The project will develop a theoretical model to evaluate these impacts, comparing Mandarin with other languages; measure semantic relationships at various levels using Large Language Models; use eye-tracking and EEG/ERP to study semantics-driven effects in sentence processing; and eventually apply findings to brain disease patients using intracranial EEG for preoperative assessment and language rehabilitation.

The Faculty is committed to support and promote the development of individual and collaborative research projects and programmes, broadening their impact across and beyond academia.