Soonja Choi
Soonja Choi () is an Austria-based linguist from South Korea. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean. Biography Choi initially studied French language and literature, receiving her BA at Sacred Heart Women's College in Seoul in 1972 and her MA at Seoul National University in 1976. After this she went to study in France, and received a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) in 1980. Her PhD in linguistics was awarded in 1986 by SUNY Buffalo. After her doctoral studies, Choi spent some time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada, before being appointed assistant professor at San Diego State University in 1987. She remained at SDSU until her retirement, being promoted to associate professor in 1991 and full professor in 1997. In 2008 she founded the Korean Studies Program at SDSU, and she remains its director. Choi has retained links with Europe throughout her career. From 1988 to 1996 she was active as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she collaborated with Melissa Bowerman. Since 2012 she has also been Research Professor at the Comparative Psycholinguistics Group of