Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

Despite solid work on the structural, sociolinguistic and political legitimacy of the Englishes of the world, the fact remains that some Englishes are more privileged than others. Thus, the circulation of different Englishes in the classroom demands a call to dismantle the symbolic and material infrastructures of unequal Englishes. This paper…

This study investigated whether Chinese--Korean bilinguals can use structure-based information to interpret Korean sentences containing floating numeral quantifiers during online processing. A numeral quantifier in Korean can be stranded from its modified noun through scrambling as long as the quantifier forms a constituent with the noun. For…

The use of relative pronouns is an intriguing topic for learners and teachers. The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in research on the use of relative pronouns. However, little attention has been given to relativizer omission among nonnative speakers in writing. This research examined the distribution of zero relativizers and the…

Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co-occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it…

The first objective of this study is to identify the types of errors made by students in their ESL writing. The second objective is to compare the types of errors (overall, spelling, mechanics, grammar, coherence, sentence structure and lexical) in descriptive writing, according to gender. The third objective is to explore an ESL teacher?s views…

Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners generally encounter difficulty in using some special rules of Chinese grammar because such grammar points do not exist in their native languages. CFL learners require an effective learning strategy to assist them in acquiring a greater understanding of Chinese grammar. Thus, we integrated a…

To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

The current study employed a neuro-imaging technique, Event-Related Potentials (ERP), to investigate real-time processing of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies by late-learning speakers of English as a second language (L2) with a Chinese native language background. An individual differences approach was also taken to examine the role of…

Malaysian philosophy, purpose and objective of the education system are rooted and based on policies stated in the National Education Policy 1956 and Education Act 1961. Whereas the Education Ordinance 1952 urged all Chinese and Tamil schools to be given an equal opportunity to learn English and Malay language together with their L1 (mother…

This study investigates whether two different means of learning the word sequence "despite the fact (that)" lead to differential outcomes of the acquisition of the grammatical structure imbedded in the word string which is, due to L1 transfer, especially problematic for Chinese learners of English. The participants of the study were randomly…

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…

Results of an empirical study of the learners' language of a group of Chinese language students show that topic-controlled deletion is a prominent feature in Chinese that is distinctly different from English and that it may result in English speakers' difficulty in forming Chinese topic chains. (nine references) (LB)