Impaired sensorimotor control, as a common feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), could be a driving factor to handwriting problems. This study examined the Chinese and English handwriting and sensorimotor skills of 15 ASD and 174 typically developing Chinese adolescents. Participants with ASD had lower writing speed and poor manual dexterity…

This article reports two experiments in which the artificial orthography paradigm was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying learning to read. In each experiment, participants were taught the meanings and pronunications of words written in an unfamiliar orthography, and the statistical structure of the mapping between written and spoken…

Many Chinese students shy away from English and they do not feel confidence in using English academically and socially. This paper aims to examine factors that have an impact on effective English teaching and learning in the Chinese context. Three aspects including characteristics of English learners, distinctions between English and Chinese…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the aging effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese tones with varied fundamental frequency (F0) contours and signal duration. Method: Both younger and older native Chinese listeners with normal hearing were recruited in 2 experiments--tone identification and tone discrimination…

This study investigates Mandarin discourse markers from both functional and prosodic perspectives. Discourse markers are defined as sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk (Schiffrin 1987). In this study, I focus on three discourse markers, "ranhou" "then", "wo juede" "I think/feel", and…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of mand, tact, and native-to-foreign (NFI) and foreign-to-native (FNI) intraverbal training on the acquisition of a foreign language. We used a multiple-baseline design across participants with an embedded adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of mand training, tact…

Recent decades have brought growing interest in understanding and measuring psychological well-being. Although multiple measures of well-being exist, most were developed with Western populations. The current study tested the factor structure of a Chinese translation of the engagement, perseverance, optimism, connectedness and happiness (EPOCH)…

The construction of knowledge boundaries is an important mechanism in the formation of disciplines. This article examines and analyzes boundary strategies and difficulties in the institutionalization of "guoxue" ("national studies" or "Chinese classics") as a discipline in recent years from the perspective of…

This study examined whether vocabulary knowledge is sufficient for second language (L2) word-meaning inferencing. Specifically, it investigated the role of the learner's sensitivity to a word's morphological structure (referred to 'morphological awareness' or 'MA' hereafter) as additional support that enhances multi-character word-meaning…

Strategy use is a critical competence for academic achievement and problem solving in globalised and information-based knowledge economies. It involves skills such as synthesising information from task source materials and elaborating on interlocutors' viewpoints during integrated group discussions. However, evidence from empirical studies on this…

The study aimed to investigate the influence of 24 Hong Kong learners' first and second languages (L1 and L2 -- Cantonese and English, respectively) on the acquisition of Mandarin as a third language (L3) and to discuss how multilingual learners acquire L3 pronunciation features. The most frequent phonological features in L2 English and L3…

A South African university and a Chinese university embarked on a collaborative research project in 2014. The project was propelled by the introduction of Mandarin as a second additional language in South African schools and Mandarin taught as a foreign language to non-Chinese learners and mixed-blood learners (one parent is ethnic Chinese) in…

The current study investigated the mechanism of language switching in unbalanced visual unimodal bilinguals as well as balanced and unbalanced bimodal bilinguals during a picture naming task. All three groups exhibited significant switch costs across two languages, with symmetrical switch cost in balanced bimodal bilinguals and asymmetrical switch…

Knowledge about how characters are written has been argued to play a particularly important role in how children learn to read Chinese. In the current study, we investigate the role that knowledge about writing characters plays in visual word processing in skilled adult readers. While there is clear neuropsychological evidence against the strong…

The importance of academic interest has been emphasised in education, both as a construct influencing achievement, and as an important learning outcome. However, psychological predictors such as personality and intelligence that characterise students who become interested in coursework are often neglected. The present study examined the influences…