Gender-fair language makes women and people of other genders, their interests, and achievements more visible. However, critics argue that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of texts. This study tests these assumptions specifically concerning the gender asterisk, a form of gender-fair language that makes people…

Purpose: The lexical quality (LQ) hypothesis predicts that a skilled reader's lexicon will be inhabited by a range of low- to high-quality items, and the probability of representing a word with high quality varies as a function of person-level, word-level, and item-specific variables. These predictions were tested with spelling accuracy as a gauge…

Extensive research has been conducted to investigate the role of emojis in interpretation, impression, perceptions, personality and relationship building. However, in the higher education sector, few studies have examined how emojis influence the learning motivation and performance of students. Using the theories of source credibility and stimulus…

The use of phonetic symbols in language teaching classrooms, as a bottom-up approach to pronunciation instruction, has been debated. This study investigates the perspectives of Turkish instructors of English as a foreign language on their use of phonetic symbols for teaching pronunciation at tertiary-level institutions. To explore this issue,…

In the current study, we conducted 2 eye-tracking reading experiments to explore whether sentence context can influence neighbor effects in word recognition during Chinese reading. Chinese readers read sentences in which the targets' orthographic neighbors were either plausible or implausible with the pretarget context. The results revealed that…

Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Using two-character Chinese word targets in a masked priming lexical-decision task, Gu and colleagues (2015) demonstrated a significant transposed character (TC) priming effect. More importantly, the priming effect was the same size for single-morpheme words and multiple-morpheme words, suggesting that TC priming effects are not influenced by…

This study investigates how Korean students produce and perceive single and double consonant letters in English words. To this end, twenty-eight Korean learners of English participated in the production and perception tests of English consonants /p, b, s, d, k, g/ with single and double letters. The participants were first asked to produce English…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word…

This study investigated the development of component awareness, semantic radical identification ability, semantic radical knowledge application, Chinese character recognition, and the relationship among these abilities in nonnative speakers. A total of 139 Vietnamese undergraduates majoring in Chinese language who were sorted according to Chinese…

This article explores how leading textbook authors select and instruct vocabulary in beginner and intermediate Chinese textbooks used in the United States. Leading textbook authors were approached; subsequently; four authors completed interviews with pre-designed questions. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyse the interviews, and their…

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole…

In the present article, we report two eye-tracking experiments on how Chinese readers segment incremental words while reading Chinese. Incremental words are multicharacter words containing a subset of characters that constitute another word (referred to as the "embedded word"). For example, in a word containing three characters ABC…