This study examined whether "melodic contour deafness" (insensitivity to the direction of pitch movement) in congenital amusia is associated with specific types of pitch patterns (discrete versus gliding pitches) or stimulus types (speech syllables versus complex tones). Thresholds for identification of pitch direction were obtained using discrete…

Preliminary evidence suggests that handwriting difficulties are common to children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, the nature of the task-specific impairments is needed to be clarified. The aim of this study was to describe handwriting capacity in ADHD children without DCD and identify underlying factors of…

British higher education is becoming more and more market-driven following the increase in tuition fees in 2012. As a result, universities need to respond more readily to the market, and student demand and the high employability of graduates are now a priority for most universities. With the growing importance of Asian economies in the new age of…

In language learning, there is much evidence to suggest that heritage language (HL) learners exhibit learning needs and profiles that are distinct from non-HL learners. In the case of Chinese language teaching in Victoria, this issue is particularly pronounced because of the loose eligibility criterion that divides students into the streams of…

The goal of the present study was to test opposing views about 4 issues concerning predictors of individual differences in Chinese written composition: (a) whether morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory represent distinct and measureable constructs in Chinese or are just manifestations of general language ability; (b)…

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of what is needed for creating and teaching an online Chinese course and some systematic recommendations for what a Chinese language teacher needs to know in order to continuously succeed in the new teaching context. An exhaustive review of empirical studies published in the past seven years is…

This study focuses on a specific Chinese immigrant subgroup, immigrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Arizona, and details the impact of different immigrant experiences and settlement patterns on parents' attitudes toward Mandarin maintenance. Data were collected through an eight-month-long ethnographic research in Arizona. The…

Different histories and cultures breed people in the West and the East, and shape their different thought patterns. The differences are manifested in languages they speak and constitute an obstacle in bi-directional understanding and interpretation. In the paper, efforts are made to exemplify the differences in English and Chinese sentence-making,…

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli,…

This article presents a case study examining the demise of a high school Mandarin language program in a school district that appeared to offer an exceptionally friendly habitat for its survival. Though members of the school board majority who voted against funding the program offered rational explanations for their decision (e.g., insufficient…

The role of morphemic meaning in Chinese word recognition was examined with the masked and unmasked priming paradigms. Target words contained ambiguous morphemes biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meanings. Prime words either contained the same ambiguous morphemes in the subordinate interpretations or were unrelated to the targets. In…

The assumption that each culture has its own distinctive identity has been generally accepted in the discussion of cultural identities. Quite often identity formation is not perceived as a dynamic and interactive ongoing process that engages other cultures and involves change in its responses to different challenges at different times. I will…

The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2…

This article elucidates theoretical underpinnings for the use of one's self in the pastoral theological classroom. The contemplative bow is developed as a capacious metaphor to describe appropriate self use and its necessary importance in the teaching and learning of pastoral arts in a theological curriculum. Central to the argument is the…

With a view of the deficiency irregular phenomena existing in logbook recordation among Chinese crew members, this paper analyzed the language characteristics and recording requirement of logbook, expounded how to employ accurate, concise and precise words to record logbook, listed out matters to be paid attention to in the process of recording…