Purpose: We examined the effect of character complexity on early Chinese literacy (word reading and writing). We also investigated whether cognitive skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming [RAN]) could moderate the influence of character complexity on literacy outcomes. Method: Our pre-registered study…

The Chinese writing system is different from English in that individual words both comprise one to four characters and are not separated by clear word boundaries (e.g., interword spaces). These differences raise the question of how readers of Chinese know where to move their eyes to support efficient lexical processing? The widely accepted…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

Purpose: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Research has revealed the extent and mechanism of the relation between language (dominated by alphabetic systems) and students' mathematics learning, but when it comes to Chinese language (an orthographic system), nature remains elusive. In this meta-analysis we aim to quantify the size of the relation between Chinese language and mathematics and…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

Learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) tend to swap the two characters within a coordinative compound word in verbal identification and written production. This mixed methods study not only investigated how CFL learners identified intercharacter orthographic and semantic relationships within two-morpheme coordinative compound words, but…

Task-irrelevant background sound can disrupt performance of visually based cognitive tasks. The cross-modal breakdown of attentional selectivity in the context of reading was addressed using analyses of eye movements. Moreover, the study addressed whether task-sensitivity to distraction via background speech on reading was modulated by the…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

This paper explores a general approach to paraphrase generation using a pre-trained seq2seq model fine-tuned using a back-translated anatomy and physiology textbook. Human ratings indicate that the paraphrase model generally preserved meaning and grammaticality/fluency: 70% of meaning ratings were above 75, and 40% of paraphrases were considered…

In studies of visual object recognition, strong inversion effects accompany the acquisition of expertise and imply the involvement of configural processing. Chinese literacy results in sensitivity to the orthography of Chinese characters. While there is some evidence that this orthographic sensitivity results in an inversion effect, and thus…