This study reports on findings from two experiments investigating the interpretive patterns of overt pronouns in an embedded subject position with three types of matrix subjects (i.e. a referential NP, a quantified NP, or a "wh"-phrase) in Mandarin, English, and Japanese. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), overt pronouns in…

Purpose: This study focuses on examining how individual differences, including biological, linguistic, and cognitive traits, and prosodic focus affect the computation biases and reaction time (RT) associated with quantity scalar terms in Mandarin-speaking children aged 3-8 years. Method: The participants of this study were 27 Mandarin-speaking…

This study examined second language (L2) learning difficulty of 13 Chinese grammatical constructions on the basis of teachers' perceptions and associated the L2 learning difficulty of Chinese grammatical constructions with teacher-perceived learner grammatical competence and with the instructional levels. A total of 77 experienced teachers were…

This article challenges the current framing of English as a dominant global language and focuses specifically on African international students' investment in Chinese language learning and the enactment of imagined identity in China. Drawing upon Darvin and Norton's theorisation of "Identity and a model of investment," we present an…

This study investigates the strategies employed by Thai learners of Chinese as a second language (L2) to comprehend metaphors, focusing on how language proficiency shapes their approach. Using a mixed-methods design, 29 participants--ranging from beginner to advanced levels--completed metaphor interpretation tasks and provided self-reports on…

Foreign language education can promote international trade, which, in turn, informs the planning of foreign language education. This study examines how bilateral trade between China and other countries promotes the development of Chinese language education from the perspective of policy planning. The research introduces the structural absorption…

This study involved a three-level meta-analysis on the correlations between metalinguistic awareness (i.e., orthographic, phonological, and morphological awareness) and Chinese word reading. Based on 16,823 individuals from 81 studies, the results revealed moderate associations between all three metalinguistic skills and Chinese word reading.…

Research on the phonological development of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not yet reached consistent conclusions, and systematic studies from different language groups are needed. This study aimed to systematically investigate the characteristics of phonological development in 3-6 year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD. We…

This article presents a narrative inquiry of a Chinese heritage mother to theorize and explicate how historical, relational, and spatial processes impacted her negotiation with power and agency in relation to her own heritage language (HL) identity development. A narrative approach enables us to draw on participant counter-stories against master…

People regularly read multi-line texts in different formats and publishers, internationally, must decide how to present text to make reading most effective and efficient. Relatively few studies have examined multi-line reading, and fewer still Chinese multi-line reading. Here, we examined whether texts presented in single or double columns, and…

Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the…

This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After…

Languages employ different means to manifest the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In Mandarin Chinese, unaccusative verbs are allowed in the inversion construction "V-le NP", while unergative verbs are not. This grammaticality contrast brings a presence/absence contrast between the two verb classes in the inversion construction in…

Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of…

Previous research suggests that statistical learning enhances memory for self-related information at the individual level and that individuals exhibit better memory for partner-related items than they do for irrelevant items in joint contexts (i.e., the joint memory effect, JME). However, whether statistical learning improves memory for…