Exploring the underinvestigated area of instruction during study abroad, this article offers a quantitative study of linguistic development among second language university learners of Chinese during a semester in China. A comparison is made between learners following task-based language teaching and a comparison group following a traditional…

Children exhibit a self-relevance effect whereby they share more candies with close friends and acquaintances than with strangers. The present study aimed to reduce the negative consequences of self-relevance effects by enhancing the behavioural control of sharing behaviour. This study initiated two behavioural control levels to investigate…

The purpose of this study was firstly to investigate the mathematical metacognitive characteristics of high-efficiency students by comparing high-efficiency and low-efficiency students. Secondly, the aim was to explore the pathways of mathematical metacognition of efficient mathematics learners in mathematics achievement. In this study,…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

The study explores the effects of a hybrid instructional approach combining Situated Learning (SL) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) on the executive functions and cognitive abilities of fourth-grade students learning English as a second language (ESL). Method: An experimental design was employed, with students divided into control and…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

The pervasive use of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in second language (L2) learning has generated increasing interest among researchers in integrating SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT). This study examined the effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners' language production in SCMC modality to develop…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

This experimental study examined the effect of answering strategic adjunct questions (AQs) on L2 reading comprehension and strategy use. Participants were 124 Chinese intermediate advanced EFL learners from a large public university in China. Of them, 24 and 100 participated in the pilot study and formal study, respectively. Participants read two…

Researchers have been investigating the effects of different planning conditions on learners' second language (L2) writing performance. However, whether such effects differ regarding specific planning conditions and task complexity has remained underexplored. This study examined the effects of pre-task planning (PTP) versus unpressured online…

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…