This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

This study investigated the extent to which home exposure (HE) to the Chinese language affected the oral proficiency of students of intermediate-level college Mandarin Chinese. In fourteen hypotheses, it was predicted that HEs would perform at a higher level than would non-home-exposure students (NHEs). Students were given a simulated oral…

A language typology based on common errors made in pronunciation of English by speakers of other languages is presented and discussed. The classification system was developed from the concept of interlanguage, the intermediate step between a language learner's native and target languages, and the notion that interference in learning a new language…

This selective bibliography is divided into 2 main sections. The first deals with Chinese-English contrastive studies and lists 8 books, or sections in books, and 19 journal articles. The second section deals with error analysis for Chinese speakers learning English and lists 4 articles. The entries range in date from 1948 to 1974 with the…