Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the…

In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472-517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev…

This paper examines the implications of the association patterns in our understanding of the mental lexicon. By applying the principles of graph theory to word association data, we intend to explore which measures tap better into lexical knowledge. To that end, we had different groups of English as Foreign language learners complete a lexical…

Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

This study aimed to investigate the effects of judgment frames, cues, and test criteria on the accuracy of metacomprehension monitoring. The design was a 2 (rating comprehension vs. predicting performance) × 2 (memory cues vs. comprehension cues) × 2 (detailed questions test vs. inferential questions test) mixed design with judgment frames and…

In the present study, we showed evidence of an integration between two unconscious semantic representations. In experiment 1, two masked Chinese words of the same or different categories ("orange apple" or "grape hammer") were simultaneously presented in the prime, followed by two Chinese words also of same or different…

Lexical stress plays a critical role in multisyllabic word reading in English. However, assignment of English lexical stress, which is neither fixed nor marked in writing, can pose significant challenges for English learners and has not been well-understood. The present study aims to fill the research gap by studying sensitivity to lexical stress…

The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those…

How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners' sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech…

Imprecise articulation is the major issue reported in various types of dysarthria. Detection of articulation errors can help in diagnosis. The cues derived from both the burst and the formant transitions contribute to the discrimination of place of articulation of stops. It is believed that any acoustic deviations in stops due to articulation…

This study examined the importance of syllable position, duration, and tone/pitch for the assignment of stress in Chinese hums. Twenty native Mandarin speakers and 20 native English speakers were asked to assign primary stress to two-syllable Chinese hums. The importance of acoustic cues for stress assignment was also evaluated. Our findings…

A number of studies in different languages have shown that speakers may be sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology in the absence of verb meaning (Caramazza et al. in Cognition 28(3):297-332, 1988; Clahsen in Behav Brain Sci 22(06):991-1013, 1999; Post et al. in Cognition 109(1):1-17, 2008). In this study, sensitivity to inflectional…

It is unknown whether linguistic cues influence preschoolers' recognition of facial expression when the emotion of the face is incongruent with the linguistic cues and what type of linguistic cue is influential in the modulation of facial expression. In a priming task, we presented 5-year-old children three types of linguistic information…

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and…