Suggests that, in some Fujian Southern Min dialects, the patterns VP-neg and Adv-VP are mutually exclusive, presenting data from Xiamen to show recent innovations in the yes-no question pattern. Describes this innovation, explaining how the origin of the innovative patterns and limitations on their further development are influenced by…

Discusses information retrieval in the Chinese language and describes three representation methods for texts: 1-gram or character, bigram, and short-word. Describes a study that investigated using more than one method simultaneously to improve retrieval effectiveness and considers word segmentation and costs. (Author/LRW)

Optional course choices were related to career aspirations as a follow-up to a survey of secondary-school students. Interviews with ethnic Chinese students (N=27) are reported. Three themes were found in responses; gender and ethnicity were not important themes. Findings are discussed in relation to other studies of Chinese ethnicity. (Author/EMK)

Attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. (Author/VWL)

Reports a study investigating the status of thematic verbs in second language acquisition (SLA) of Chinese by French-speaking, German-speaking, and English-speaking learners. Provides evidence that the thematic verb does not raise in SLA of Chinese, which casts doubt on the reliability of these hypotheses in the second language literature.…

Analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle "de" in the history of Chinese. Argues that grammaticalization is subject to influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. (Author/VWL)

At a time when many policymakers and business leaders are clamoring for American children to take up the languages of Asia and the Middle East to help buttress the United States' international competitiveness and national security, the policies and resources are as much of a mismatch as the languages that are being taught. More than 90 percent of…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…

In multilingual Asian communities, determining language dominance for clinical assessment and intervention is often complex. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report classification tool for identifying the dominant language in English-Mandarin bilinguals. Participants (N = 168) completed a questionnaire on language history and…

The characteristics which were held to define the Chinese language within the Western intellectual tradition placed it for a time at the centre in discussions of the genealogy of mankind. The dominant premodern paradigm for the explanation of human linguistic diversity was Biblical exegesis, as discussed and elaborated within the framework of…

Ethnic and generation differences in the frequency and types of ethnic socialization messages that 524 eleventh-grade adolescents from Mexican, Chinese, and European backgrounds received from their parents were examined. Results indicated that adolescents from both Mexican and Chinese backgrounds reported more cultural socialization and…

In this study I investigate the impact of different characteristics of the L2 speech signal on the intelligibility of L2 speakers of English to native listeners. Three native listeners were observed and questioned as they orthographically transcribed utterances taken from connected conversational speech produced by three L2 speakers from different…

This study compared Mainland Chinese, Chinese American and European American mothers' self-reported emotional expression within the family. Mothers of 3-year-old European American (n = 40), Chinese American (n = 39) and Mainland Chinese (n = 36) children (n = 20 girls per group) completed the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire (SEFQ),…

The effect of capitalizing on orthography in auditory learning of English words was examined in 74 children who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their primary language. To use orthographic information for auditory word learning, children must recode printed words phonologically to assist the reconstruction of the speech single misheard or underspecified,…

A Chinese script is represented by Chinese characters and each character is a square-shaped configuration with condensed strokes. Children in Hong Kong are explicitly taught to write at a very young age. They are guided to draw vertical and horizontal lines at age three, and are required to write simple characters with few strokes at age four.…