This study investigated whether teacher expectations had significant effects on ethnic minority students' second language and foreign language learning in senior high schools. The participants of this study were 52 teachers and 836 ethnic minority students from 10 senior high schools in southwest China. Data of teacher expectations for students'…

This scholarly investigation delves into the metamorphosis of China's language policies across three distinct epochs spanning over two millennia, tracing from ancient China to contemporary times. Employing a sociolinguistic lens, the analysis elucidates the historical trajectories of these policies, accentuating their theoretical and pragmatic…

Purpose: The application of Chinese Mandarin electrolaryngeal (EL) speech for laryngectomees has been limited by its drawbacks such as single fundamental frequency, mechanical sound, and large radiation noise. To improve the intelligibility of Chinese Mandarin EL speech, a new perspective using the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system was…

During the reading of alphabetic scripts and scene perception, eye movements are programmed more efficiently in horizontal direction than in vertical direction. We propose that such a directional advantage may be due the overwhelming reading experience in the horizontal direction. Writing orientation is highly flexible for Traditional Chinese…

Purpose: This study aimed to explore the effects of Mandarin congenital amusia with or without lexical tone deficit (i.e., tone agnosia and pure amusia) on Mandarin vowel and tone identification in different types of vowels (e.g., monophthong, diphthongs, and triphthongs) embedded in consonant-vowel contexts with and without semantic content.…

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or…

This qualitative study explored Hong Kong students' views and reactive emotions towards interpersonal teacher behaviour in their classrooms. Fifteen focus-group interviews were conducted with 69 secondary-school students. Content analysis was performed to identify main themes. Cultural similarities and differences were identified in students'…

The present study employed a self-paced reading task in conjunction with concurrent acceptability judgements to examine how similar or different English natives and Chinese learners of English are when processing non-local agreement. We also tested how determiner-number specification modulates number agreement computation in both native and…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

We investigated the correlates of word reading and spelling as well as the relations of word reading and spelling in Hong Kong Chinese children. A set of literacy-related skills and delayed copying were administered in kindergarten, and Chinese word reading and dictation were tested at kindergarten as well as in first and second grade. The final…

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of peer video feedback on adult e-learners' language learning. The participants were 60 first-year e-learning students majoring in telecommunications at an e-learning college in Beijing and participating in a 19-week English course. They were divided evenly into two groups with two peer feedback…

Background: Pragmatics has generally been defined as the ability to use language in social situations, it is commonly regarded as the third major component of language ability. To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Chinese-speaking children. Aims: To describe the translation of the Language Use Inventory (LUI) from…

Phenotypical heterogeneity in language abilities is a hallmark of autism but remains poorly understood. The present study collected naturalistic language samples from parent-child interactions. We quantified verbal abilities (mean length of utterance, tokens, types) of 50 Chinese-speaking children (M = 5; 6) and stratified subgroups based on their…

Minority education in contemporary China consists of two systems: a bilingual education system that greatly emphasizes the ethnic minority language, and a monolingual education system with instruction only in the Chinese language. These two different language-based programs have a significant influence on self-identity. This article, which is…

This study explored the role of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension ability of Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners. Two-hundred and nine CSL students participated in this study and completed a series of measures including two tests of morphological awareness (morpheme discrimination test and compound…