Ariel Chan received her Ph.D. in East Asian Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarship intersects the disciplines of bilingualism, heritage and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and interactional linguistics.
In her dissertation project, she examined how Cantonese-English bilinguals' cultural identity and sociocultural context impact their language processing and cognitive control from a synergistic psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approach. Her research is centered on studying bilingualism in its own right, examining bilinguals’ language and cognitive development as a proper cultural form rather than an exception from the White monolingual English norms.
Her dissertation research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award from the National Science Foundation. She has also received multiple competitive intramural awards at UCLA, including a Dissertation Year Fellowship, a Hiroshi Wagatsuma Fellowship, a Sasakawa Graduate Fellowship, a Dissertation Fieldwork Fellowship for International Studies, and a Teaching Assistant Award for Excellence in Teaching. Chan is an immigrant from Hong Kong and a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is a Cantonese-English bilingual speaker who constantly navigates between her bicultural identities in the Cantonese diaspora.