Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

The medium of instruction (MoI) is regulated in the bilingual education of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in two ways. One requires most school subjects to be taught through Mandarin, whereas the other demands that all subjects be delivered with Mandarin as the MoI. A field trip to the capital city, Urumqi, was conducted in 2017 to investigate…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify whether differences in dynamic range (DR) are evident across the spoken languages of Korean, English, and Mandarin. Method: Recorded sentence-level speech materials were used as stimuli. DR was quantified using different definitions of DR (defined as the range in decibels from the highest to the…

This discourse analysis focuses on the Chinese and Japanese writing of a young student living in Japan who is ethnically Chinese and multilingual. A method for analyzing linguistically diverse student writing was used to explore the literary elements and heteroglossic voices in this student's writing. Such analysis has been shown to be beneficial…

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the…

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2-4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading…

Test Purpose: The CATTI aims to measure competence in translation and interpreting (including simultaneous and consecutive interpreting) between Chinese and seven foreign languages: English, Japanese, French, Arabic, Russian, German, or Spanish. The test is intended to cover a wide range of domains including business, government, academia, and…

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing (HP), which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified…

In this article the author combines Chinese literary theory and new materialism with her ongoing research into creative writing. In the opening section, the author discusses how language and writing can be approached using new materialist theories. She then enters into a creative non-fiction "research-creation" piece that explores how…

Purpose: Current understanding about the effect of first language (L1) background on morphological awareness (MA) development in those who are bilingual is largely limited to school-aged second-language learners. This study examined the development of MA in bilingual Mandarin-English (ManEngBi) and Spanish-English (SpaEngBi) children ages 4 to 7…

This article deals with the challenges of data collection from a Conversation Analysis (CA) perspective to researching synchronous, audio-visual eTandems. Conversation analysis is a research tradition that developed out of ethnomethodology and is concerned with the question of how social interaction in naturally occurring situations is organized.…

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about the extent to which the role of linguistic skills such as phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA) in reading is universal. In this meta-analysis, the authors examined the relationship between PA, MA, and reading (accuracy, fluency, and…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

Working memory (WM) deficiency is a primary reason for the poor academic performance of children with learning disabilities (LDs). Studies have shown that the WM of typical children could be improved through training, and WM training contributes to improving their fluid intelligence and academic achievement. However, few studies have investigated…

To investigate children's inclusion of language-outgroup members, English-speaking children (8-9 years and 10-11 years of age, N = 57) made inclusion decisions while playing a simulated ball-tossing game, Cyberball, and while evaluating hypothetical scenarios involving language-outgroup members who wanted to play with their group. In the Cyberball…