We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Background: Some research shows a link between sleep behaviours and school achievement in English-speaking children and adolescents. Aims: The current study aimed to examine the relationship between children's sleep behaviours and aspects of their school achievement in Mandarin-speaking children who are living in Taiwan. Sample: The present study…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

The purpose of this study was to provide high frequency word lists for Mandarin-speaking children between 3 and 6 years of age and to explore the differences between each part of speech (POS) category among different age groups. Participants were 209 typically developing native Mandarin speakers aged between 3 and 6 years, born in Taiwan, and…

Labovian narrative theory is used to explore the personal narrative performance of five-year-old urban aboriginal children. Fifty-two participants with the same socioeconomic status (half aboriginal, half non-aboriginal) were recruited from 11 preschools in metropolitan Taipei, Taiwan. Narratives were collected by interviewing individual children…

In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical -- a mechanism we call "semantic decoding" -- and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16…

Unlike their peers with typical hearing, reading and speech challenges observed among children with hearing loss may not only be caused by developmental issues but also hearing-related problems. Although conventional oral reading assessments are useful for identifying children at risk of reading difficulties, they do not help examiners identify…

Prior research on ambient-language effects in babbling has often suggested infants produce language-specific phonological features within the first year. These results have been questioned in research failing to find such effects and challenging the positive findings on methodological grounds. We studied English- and Chinese-learning infants at 8,…

This study examined the differences in perceptions of the value of feedback for improving English speaking performance between students who received video feedback and those who received written feedback and their preferences for written or video feedback. A total of 43 English as a foreign language students participated in this study to produce a…

This study investigates how the use of discourse markers reflects speaking fluency in Chinese learners. In this study, 220 min of online Chinese courses were transcribed, with 17 Chinese learners and 5 native Chinese teachers as participants. Half of the transcribed data were drawn from students living in Taipei, Taiwan, a Chinese-speaking…

The focus of this research is on an international distance discussion class carried out in Chinese between university students in Japan, China and Taiwan using videoconferencing. Smiling was used as an interactional index in an analysis of the archival footage of the recordings of the discussion between native speakers (NS) of Chinese and…

Previous research has shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had difficulty integrating narrative information coherently. The majority of these studies focused on people narrating in English; however, little is known about the narrative abilities of Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. This study investigates the ability of…

Investigates the tonal changes in Mandarin Chinese from 1932 when "standard Mandarin" was legitimized to the period between 1963-85 during which two studies on tones were carried out. Discussion focuses on differences over time, and on differences between actual pronunciations or words in Taipei and Beijing and their dictionary…