Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study…

Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tonal languages, as CIs do not efficiently code pitch information. Mandarin is a tonal language with lexical tones and tonal processes such as neutral tone and tone sandhi, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations. Previous studies suggest that early…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Previous research mainly with monolingual children shows a positive relationship between English skills and emotion regulation. No study to date has examined if or how learning of grammatical morphemes might be associated with emotion regulation among bilingual preschoolers. This study examined how Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers performed…

We investigated typical errors made by Mandarin-speaking children when measured by the Preschool Language Scales-fifth edition, Screening Test (PLS-5 Screening Test). The intention was to provide preliminary data for the development of a guideline for early childhood educators and psychologists who use the test with Mandarin-speaking children.…

Research Findings: The main aim of this study was to examine whether language skills and emotion regulation are associated with social competence and whether the relationship between English skills and social competence is moderated by emotion regulation in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers. The language skills of 96 children ages…