This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text.…

The term "glocal" has been used to describe phenomena that simultaneously blend both global and local elements (see Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995, p. 101). Nowhere is this more evident than in the existence of 3arabizi, itself a blended language composed of English and Vernacular Arabic, written in Latin letters but using…

Previous literature in alphabetic languages suggests that the occipital-temporal region (the ventral pathway) is specialized for automatic parallel word recognition, whereas the parietal region (the dorsal pathway) is specialized for serial letter-by-letter reading (and). However, few studies have directly examined the role of the ventral and…

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of pinyin (a phonic transcription system) in learning vocabulary of Chinese as a second language from the perspective of cognitive load theory. In the reported experiment, the learning effects of the vertical and horizontal layouts of characters, pinyin,…

Regardless of the script, in the process of learning to read words, readers develop awareness of the structural and functional properties of words with increased exposure to the script. However, as sub-word units that are critical for phonological or morphological processing or both are not uniform, the types of the awareness may vary from script…

"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…

The 13,000 entries in this English-to-Chinese dictionary were chosen to represent "common words and expressions in art, education, science, sports, and music, as well as basic terminology in military and other fields." Each entry consists of an English word, an abbreviation for its part of speech, and one or more Chinese equivalents in…

The influence of different instructional presentations upon meaning and pronunciation acquisition in character learning was examined. High school students learned to identify a series of characters in terms of their associated pinyin and English translation prompts. Acquisition was shown to proceed more rapidly when the Chinese character was…

This dictionary contains 1,500 Chinese-Cantonese characters (selected from three frequency lists), and more than 6,000 Chinese-Cantonese terms (selected from three Cantonese-English dictionaries). The characters are arranged alphabetically according to the U.S. Army Language School System of Romanization, which is described in the…

This English-Tibetan dictionary contains 16,000 main entries and subentries, a total of 45,000 lexical items. The dictionary is primarily oriented to spoken communication and was designed to be semantically sensitive, bridging the semantic gap between Tibetan and English. Tibetan terms corresponding to submeanings of English subterms are…

This student's dictionary of over 4,500 characters (head words) and 28,000 combinations is designed to "alleviate the shortcomings" of traditional Chinese dictionaries which follow the Radical System for character indexing. The head words are first listed according to their simplified variant as well as traditional forms, being arranged…

This dictionary is divided into two main sections, each containing approximately 9,000 entries. In the first section, English to Cherokee, the information is organized in 3 columns. In column 1 are found English words in standard English orthography and in alphabetical order, in column 2 the romanized representation of the Cherokee translation and…

A glossary of commonly used and subject-area English words and their Arabic equivalents with romanization was prepared for teachers and Arabic-speaking, limited-English-speaking children in the Chicago public schools. It consists of: (1) a key to Arabic pronunciation of velarized consonants, glottal consonants, and Arabic double-consonants; (2) a…