This thesis is about strong island effects and intervention effects. Strong island effects are contexts where operator-variable dependencies cannot be established. The paradigmatic cases of strong island violations in Chinese occur in "why"-questions. This thesis explores a basic contrast: "why"-questions fail to be interpreted…

Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are both considered aspect languages for the simple reason that they both mark grammatical aspect morphologically: the former attaches a particle expressing only aspectual meaning to the root of a verb, while the latter attaches a suffix expressing both aspectual and tense meaning to the root of a verb. Since tense…

This paper presents an augmented reality-based Chinese character composition game (ARC) that employs augmented papers to engage lower primary school students in collaborative Chinese character learning. A design research approach was used to gain a holistic view of designing, enacting, and evaluating the ARC. The participants included four…

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by Chinese students learning Thai through the "Tone Application", and conducts an attitude test towards the use of the Tone Application. A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by the participants with 40 native Thai speakers was also conducted. The acoustic…

The parasitic model proposes that novel words in L3 learning will build parasitic connections to already learned words that share orthographic or phonological similarities. This accounts for little in terms of the connections between words that share very few similarities. The present study explored the parasitic connections of L3 word concepts to…

Although increasing literature has suggested that emotion-label words (e.g., anger, delight) and emotion-laden words (e.g., thief, bride) were processed differently in native language (L1), there was a lack of neuroimaging evidence showing such differences in second language (L2). The current study compared the cortical responses to emotion-label…

The notion of language learners as informed consumers developed by Cohen and White (2008) takes up the issue of how best to develop the knowledge, skills and awareness of language learners given the infinite variety of language learning opportunities. The informed consumer approach focused not only on developing awareness of both formal and…

This article shows that first language (L1) transfer may not be effectively maintained in the interlanguage due to confounding factors in the second language (L2). When two factors, "A" and "B," are correlated in the L2, second language learners may only acquire "B," even if "A" is present in the L1.…

The study investigated the effect of marginal glossing and frequency of occurrence on the incidental learning of six aspects of vocabulary knowledge through reading in the second language (L2) Chinese. Participants were 30 intermediate L2 Chinese learners in an American public university. The MACOVA tests indicated that the treatment group who…

This study investigated how video caption type affected vocabulary learning and listening comprehension of low-intermediate Chinese-speaking learners of English. Each video was presented twice with one of the five caption types: (1) no caption (NC), (2) full caption with no audio (FCNA), (3) full caption (FC), (4) full caption with highlighted…

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to…

Although Singapore, a linguistically and ethnically diverse city-state, uses four official languages, namely Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English, which are supposed to enjoy equal status, there appears to be a pecking order to these languages. English seems to be the dominant language when taking into consideration the bilingual education policy,…

This article reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of one out-of-school activity: "China Club". China Club, an initiative of Scotland's National Centre for Languages and the Confucius Institute for Scotland's Schools, was established with the central aim of teaching Mandarin language and Chinese culture to young people…

Purpose: The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method:…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the happiness and education principles of St. Augustine and Mozi through the primary and the secondary language resources. To review the paper logically, three research questions are addressed. First, what are the happiness principles of Augustine and Mozi? Second, what are the educational principles of…