This paper explores the "multilingual lived experience" (MLE) of four Mongol-Chinese individuals. This lived experience is set in the multilingual context of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) of China. Compared to the ethnic majority Han people, who are Mandarin (Putonghua) speakers, and who study English as a L2, Inner…

Existing studies have evidenced that mobile-assisted vocabulary learning, which allows students to create artefacts and engage in productive skills, can help them in vocabulary learning. However, there remains little research and validated approaches for designing seamless vocabulary learning experiences for young learners. In this paper, a…

This study explored the family language policy, bilingual parenting profiles, and the predictors among Chinese parents in Singapore. Altogether 175 parents of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (aged 2;6-5;6) were sampled and surveyed. The research results indicated that: (1) a majority of the parents (93.7%) believed in early bilingualism but…

Studies on language shift in Singapore have focused on the language use within ethnic communities. However, despite increasing numbers of interethnic marriages, very few studies have explored the effect of such marriages on LS. This article explores the language practices within Malay-Chinese mixed marriages and examines how language policies in…

Scholarly attention to foreign language learning boredom (FLLB) has surged in recent years. However, little is known about L2 learners' online FLLB experience prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To fill this gap, the present mixed-methods study explores the conceptual structure and sources of FLLB in an online learning environment. A corpus of 348…

Previous research on cross-linguistic transfer has provided evidence about the transfer of reading performance and strategies. However, little knowledge exists regarding how motivational factors (e.g. self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation [IM], extrinsic motivation [EM]) transfer and how they facilitate the transfer of reading from the first…

Chinese has a rich and diverse vocabulary of terms, especially verbs, expressing power relationships. This paper selected 25 power relationship terms from the Chinese Proficiency Scale for International Chinese Education, and used a true-false format to test the differences in acquisition between international students from Confucian cultural…

A growing body of research has provided evidence for the foreign language effect on thinking, notably decision-making. Our prior work found reduction of recency effect following positive feedback in a foreign language as compared to the native tongue during even-probability gambling. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying this effect…

This study aimed to adapt and validate a Chinese version of the online self-regulated learning questionnaire (COSLQ) with Chinese junior secondary students in Hong Kong. A total of 716 students from six schools participated voluntarily in the study. Overall, the findings of this study supported the COSLQ's psychometric quality. The COSLQ subscales…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking…

In a broader context where English is marketed as a desirable product of consumption, hiring English speakers as language teachers and de facto cultural ambassadors is a common practice in some East Asian countries. This paper investigates how 20 self-identified Asian American teachers in Taiwan teaching English in local schools wrestle with the…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

Using machine translation (MT) tools for language learning has become a common practice among language students in recent years. Studies have investigated how students use MT, how students and teachers perceive its benefits and drawbacks and how helpful it is for language learning. These studies indicate that students think MT tools are helpful in…

Reading is a very complex task in which readers obtain information to promote reading from not only the fixated word located in the foveal area but also non-fixated words located in the parafoveal area. We aimed to investigate the second language (L2) parafoveal orthographic (letter identity and letter position) processing mechanism adopting the…