The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the…

The importance of phonological awareness for learning to read may depend on the linguistic properties of a language. This study provides a careful examination of this language-specific theory by exploring the role of phoneme-level awareness in Mandarin Chinese, a language with an orthography that, at its surface, appears to require little…

Courtroom interpreting requires a high level of accuracy due to the strategic use of language in such an institutional setting. It is generally agreed among interpreting scholars that quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both propositional content and illocutionary force of the original utterances. This high standard of accuracy…

English and Chinese are satellite-framed languages in which Manner is usually incorporated with Motion in the verb and Path is denoted by the satellite. Based on Talmy's theory of motion event and typology, the research probes into translation of English and Chinese motion events and finds that: (1) Translation of motion events in English and…

Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front vowels, and…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

The utility of Chinese tone processing skill in detecting children with English reading difficulties was examined through differences in a Chinese tone experimental task between a group of native English-speaking children with reading disabilities (RD) and a comparison group of children with normal reading development (NRD). General auditory…

The neural mechanisms used in tone rises and falls in Mandarin were investigated. Nine participants were scanned while they named one-character pictures that required rising or falling tone responses in Mandarin: the left insula and right putamen showed stronger activation between rising and falling tones; the left brainstem showed weaker…

Theories of how people construct linguistic form during production are largely based on English and closely related languages. We report three experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate grammatical encoding in Mandarin Chinese, in particular the way conceptual information is mapped onto grammatical structure. The results…

Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness…

The present study examined the use of statistical cues for word boundaries during Chinese reading. Participants were instructed to read sentences for comprehension with their eye movements being recorded. A two-character target word was embedded in each sentence. The contrast between the probabilities of the ending character (C2) of the target…

Purpose: This paper seeks to examine the further integration of machine translation technologies with cross language information access in providing web users the capabilities of accessing information beyond language barriers. Machine translation and cross language information access are related technologies, and yet they have their own unique…

The purpose of this study is to find out how young children can learn, understand, and progress in the Chinese language. This study focuses on 13 students between two and three years old. The data collection methods used classroom observation, benchmarks, and parent questionnaires about at home behavior. The data analysis used is qualitative…

Industrialisation and mass education have long been considered two main determinants in the emergence of special education, but in many formerly colonised countries, such as Taiwan, historical development did not follow along these lines. In Taiwan, schools for the blind were initially set up by missionaries and colonisers, and were primarily…

In Part I, we underscore the issues surrounding young deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) learners of literacy in Taiwan who use sign to support their learning of Chinese literacy. We also described the linguistic features of Chinese writing and the visual codes used by DHH children. In Part II, we describe the reading and writing practices used with…