Previous studies on bilingual children have shown a significant correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and a unique contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading performance in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence. However, few studies have compared…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

Language switch costs have been explored less in receptive tasks than in productive tasks, and previous studies have produced mixed findings with regard to switch cost symmetry and the relationship of switch costs to executive function. To address these unresolved gaps, one hundred Chinese-English bilingual adults completed a bilingual lexical…

Although increasing literature has suggested that emotion-label words (e.g., anger, delight) and emotion-laden words (e.g., thief, bride) were processed differently in native language (L1), there was a lack of neuroimaging evidence showing such differences in second language (L2). The current study compared the cortical responses to emotion-label…

Two recent books (Jiang, 2014, "Advances in Chinese as a second language"; Wang, 2013, "Grammatical development of Chinese among non-native speakers") provide new resources for exploring the role of processing in acquiring Chinese as a second language (L2). This review article summarizes, assesses and compares some of the…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) on the reading of modifier-head case agreement in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Russian is similar to Finnish in that both languages use case endings to mark grammatical roles, whereas such markings are absent in Chinese. The critical nouns were…

The role of prosodic information in sentence processing is not usually addressed in second language (L2) instruction, and neurocognitive studies on prosody-syntax interactions are rare. Here we compare event-related potentials (ERP) of Chinese and German learners of English L2 to those of native English speakers and show how first language (L1)…

Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co-occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it…

Two experiments involving picture classifications investigated priming behavior in the context of "wh"-movement at clause edge and in indirect object position, respectively. In Experiment 1, intermediate L1-Chinese L2-English learners produced slower classification times (inhibitions) at clause edge, apparently induced by the computation of…

This project investigates second language (L2) learners' processing of four types of Chinese relative clauses crossing extraction types and demonstrative-classifier (DCl) positions. Using a word order judgment task with a whole-sentence reading technique, the study also discusses how psycholinguistic theories bear explanatory power in L2 data. An…

We report on a study of first-exposure learners with different first languages (L1s: English, Japanese) to examine their ability to process input for form and meaning. We used a rich set of tasks to tap respectively into processing, comprehension, imitation, and working memory. We show that there are advantages to having a first language (L1) that…

It has been proposed that external interfaces are vulnerable to residue optionality, whereas pure syntax and internal interfaces are acquirable in second language (L2) acquisition (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006). The proposal was tested in this article through the interpretation of overt and null embedded arguments in L2 Chinese…

This study utilizes a moving window technique to investigate how individual cognitive resources (operationalized in terms of reading span scores) might modulate the extent to which native English speakers and Chinese second language (L2) learners of English utilize plausibility information to recover from an initial misparse in the processing of…