This study examines young children's metacognition in the context of telling a written story. The participants were 36 children: 12 preschoolers, 12 kindergarteners, and 12 first graders in a kindergarten and a nearby elementary school in a northwestern city in Taiwan. Each child was asked to "read" a 13-page wordless picture book and…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of envelope dynamic-range mismatch on the intelligibility of Mandarin speech in noise by simulated bilateral electric hearing. Method: Noise-vocoded Mandarin speech, corrupted by speech-shaped noise at 5 and 0 dB signal-to-noise ratios, was presented unilaterally or bilaterally to 10 normal-hearing…

This study examined intelligibility of twelve American English vowels produced by English, Chinese, and Korean native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise in which vowels were presented at six sensation levels from 0 dB to 10 dB. The slopes of vowel intelligibility functions and the processing time for listeners to identify vowels were…

The current paper examined the role of plausibility information in the parafovea for Chinese readers by using two-character transposed words (in which the order of the component characters is reversed but are still words). In two eye-tracking experiments, readers received a preview of a target word that was (1) identical to the target word, (2) a…

Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which…

We perform motion events in all aspects of our daily life, from walking home to jumping into a pool, from throwing a frisbee to pushing a shopping cart. The fact that languages may encode such motion events in different fashions has raised intriguing questions regarding the typological classifications of natural languages in relation to…

This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of nine Chinese "measures for verbs" (Chao 1968:615), which are words used with numerals to form event quantifiers counting the eventualities denoted by the predicate of a sentence. Based on their syntactic behavior, I argue that the nine words can be divided into two groups. The…

This dissertation concerns the interaction of syntax and information structure in Mandarin Chinese and puts the theoretical assumption of parallelism between clauses and noun phrases to the test. It examines and validates the information structural status of the object phrases preposed to clause-internal positions. I argue that Rizzi's (1997)…

Integrating technologies into teaching and learning poses a significant challenge for many teachers who lack socio-techno-pedagogical know-how and time to design interventions. A possible solution is to design sound technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments with relevant content and pedagogical tools to reduce teachers' design efforts.…

International students and direct entrants--those entering a higher year of a degree--often come from socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds different from traditional students, and have different educational backgrounds. It is assumed such students need help with unfamiliar assessment tasks such as essays, reports, and so on, and many sources aim…

This qualitative study examines how Chinese immigrant parents perceive the importance of sending their children to a "good" school district and analyzes their strategies in doing so. Nine families from different economic and educational backgrounds participated in the study. Results show that some parents were not satisfied with…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of Chinese-specific morphological awareness on vocabulary acquisition among young Chinese-speaking students. The participants were 288 Chinese-speaking second graders from three different cities in China. Multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis were used to uncover the mediated and…

Native speakers of alphabetic languages, which use letters governed by grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, often find it particularly challenging to learn a logographic language whose writing system employs symbols with no direct sound-to-spelling connection but links to the visual and semantic information. The visuospatial properties of…

Many Chinese families face many difficulties in maintaining their heritage language for their children in English-dominant societies. This article first looks at the losses from monolingualism and benefits of bilingualism. Then, it explores the common methods used today in teaching Chinese. We conclude that families and community play an…