The study examines the effects of using computer delivered Processing Instruction (PI) to teach English reflexives. Thirty intermediate ESL learners participated in the pretest-treatment-posttest study. Participants received the input-based PI activities. Gains were assessed by traditional offline tasks such as sentence interpretation and…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

To investigate the grammatical constraints of code-switching (CS hereafter) under the disputes of "the constraint-based account" versus "the constraint-free account," the effects of functional category on CS have long been investigated in the existing studies. Thus, the present study, by asking 47 participants to take part in…

The onset of the verbal behavior developmental cusp of bidirectional naming (BiN) in a second language makes it possible for monolingual English-speaking children to learn names of things in a second language incidentally. We conducted 2 experiments to identify why monolingual English-speaking children cannot demonstrate BiN in another language…

Recent research has shown that the visual complexity of orthographies across writing systems influences the development of orthographic representations. Simplified and traditional Chinese characters are usually regarded as the most visually complicated writing systems currently in use, with the traditional system showing a higher level of…

This study investigates how L1 and L2 users of Mandarin perceive a rare construction in Mandarin that involves interpreting an NP in the object position as a location argument or instrument argument instead of as a theme/patient argument. For example, "kai zuoshou" (literally "drive left-hand") has been used to mean "use…

Purpose: Previous research has shown that the language-learning mechanism is affected by bilingualism resulting in a novel word learning advantage for bilingual speakers. However, less is known about the factors that might influence this advantage. This article reports an investigation of 2 factors: phonotactic probability and phonological…

Mindfulness, or [Chinese character omitted] (niàn) in Chinese, is a concept and set of related practices which have both ancient Eastern roots and current popularity (especially in the West). It provides a fascinating example of intercultural knowledge-work involving a complex set of conceptual migrations through time and space, across languages…

Grounded in the perspectives of language socialization and transnational habitus, this one-year ethnographic case study explores two middle-class Chinese sojourner families' educational, bilingual and biliterate practices after their arrival in the U.S. It addresses the process that their middle childhood children experienced, from the excitement…

Emotion regulation--as a vital part of children's development, school readiness, and academic success--begins to develop in infancy and toddler time. Much of the research on toddler emotion regulation are correlational studies in laboratory settings. Little attention has been directed to toddlers' emotion regulation in everyday naturalistic…

The present study examined phonological processing skills (phonological memory, phonological awareness, and rapid automatised naming, RAN) in relation to early Chinese reading and early Chinese mathematics for young children. Early Chinese reading was assessed with single character reading and multi-character word reading, and early mathematics…

There are limited reports about development of questionnaire to measure learning satisfaction among young children. In this research, guidelines were listed for developing a questionnaire that gauges Chinese Character Literacy Learning Satisfaction (CCLLS) among 8-year-old children. The research was undertaken based on the responses of 232…

Informed by concepts of native speakers, racial nativism, and language socialization theory, this study documented the existence of the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992, "Linguistic imperialism." Oxford: Oxford University Press) in a university-level Japanese and Chinese program in the United States. Specifically, the researcher…

As an international financial centre, Hong Kong is a metropolitan city that has given rise to multilingual characteristics in recent years. In addition to Cantonese and English, which serve mostly as first and second languages, Hong Kong residents have increasingly begun to develop a third or even a fourth language. The biliteracy and…

Access to definitions facilitates the learning of word meanings when novel words are encountered in reading. However, the memorial costs and benefits of inferring word meanings from context, compared to seeing definitions of unfamiliar words before reading, are not yet well understood. We conducted two experiments with adult L1 (English) and L2…