This study investigated English speakers' perception of Mandarin sounds, aiming to answer three major questions. First, does the perceived similarity between Mandarin and English sounds affect learners' acquisition of Mandarin sounds? Second, do the groups with different amounts of Mandarin experience differ in their perception of…

Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in Mainland China (3- to 4-year-olds; N = 192) were tested for dissociations between anticipatory looking (AL) and verbal judgments on false-belief tasks. The dissociation between the two kinds of understanding was robust despite direct false-belief test questions using a Mandarin specific think-falsely verb and…

Research Findings: In this study, 88 kindergartners received special training in lexical compounding, homophone awareness, or phonological awareness or were assigned to a control condition over a period of approximately 2 months, with 20-min lessons administered twice per week. Chinese word reading improved significantly more in the lexical…

This study aims to identify aspects of speech-in-noise recognition that are susceptible to training, focusing on whether listeners can learn to adapt to target talkers ("tune in") and learn to better cope with various maskers ("tune out") after short-term training. Listeners received training on English sentence recognition in…

The present study compared the impact of different categories of graphics used within a complex learning task. One hundred eighty five native English speaking undergraduates participated in a task that required learning 18 Chinese radicals and their English equivalent translations. A post-test only control group design compared performance…

This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like "The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny". English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences ("The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny"). This interpretation conforms…

Code switching (CS) (or language mixing) generally takes place in bilingual children's utterances, even if their parents adhere to the "one parent-one language" principle. The present case study of a Japanese-Chinese bilingual infant provides both quantitative and qualitative analyses on the impact of input on output, as manifested in CS. The…

Digital flashcards are one of the most popular self-study computer-assisted vocabulary learning tools for beginners of Chinese as a foreign language. However, studies on the effects of this widely used learning tool are scarce. Introducing a new concept--referential stimulus--into the Dual Coding Theory (DCT) framework, this study acknowledges the…

The linguistic dimensions of globalized hip-hop cannot be understood simply as a byproduct of English as an American export. As hip-hop mobilizes, it is common (and arguably necessary) for global hip-hop communities to struggle through purposeful, semiotically rooted dialectics over what constitutes "authentic" and respectable forms of…

This study examined the influence of integrative motivation, instrumental motivation and second language (L2) proficiency on socio-cultural/academic adaptation in a sample of two groups of international students studying Chinese in China. Results revealed that the non-Asian student group reported higher levels of integrative motivation,…

This paper concerns an exploratory and interpretive case study of the literacy curricula in a Canadian transnational education programme (Pseudonym: SCS) delivered in China where Ontario secondary school curricula were used at the same time as the Chinese national high school curricula. Using ethnographic tools and actor-network theory, the study…

This study investigated whether host and heritage cultural orientations were associated with Chinese preschoolers' social competence and whether such associations varied across gender in Western contexts. Ninety-six Chinese-Australian children aged 36-69 months from 15 childcare centres in Sydney participated in the study. The General Ethnicity…

This article explores some of the distinctive challenges in Chinese language education in schools and discusses how the development of the "Australian Curriculum: Chinese" has responded to these challenges. It details how the curriculum framework outlined in the "Shape of the Australian Curriculum: Languages" (ACARA, 2011)…

Stress is one of the key suprasegmentals in English sound system. It plays an important role in intelligibility and comprehensibility. However, stress often poses problems for Chinese EFL Learners. Chinese learners of English often misplace the stress in English words and sentences which subsequently may interrupt the flow of communication and…

A study was conducted to identify the scope and timing of maturational constraints in three linguistic domains within the same individuals, as well as the potential mediating roles of amount of second language (L2) exposure and language aptitude at different ages in different domains. Participants were 65 Chinese learners of Spanish and 12 native…