Narrative skills play an important role in children's reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children's narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural…

The complexity of language contact and intercultural communication has generated various issues in relation to language use and education. As one of the many Chinese dialects ("fangyans"), the Chaoshan dialect ("Teochew") has been affected by the extensive promotion of Putonghua, the key lingua franca across China, and English,…

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished…

Drawing on a raciolinguistic and AsianCrit lens, we analyze the voices of first-generation Chinese immigrant parents regarding their decisions on whether to enroll their children in Mandarin Chinese dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs. Our findings reveal Chinese immigrant parents' lack of confidence in DLBE programs as a space…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

The field of Linguistics has long been interested in the verb meanings of intransitive verbs and their argument structure, specifically the breakdown of intransitive verbs into unaccusative and unergative verb types. Despite extensive research, a universally applicable explanation for this breakdown remains elusive due in part to the variability…

Research demonstrates strong associations between psychosocial factors (motivation, attitudes, beliefs), outside of class behavior, and second language (L2) learning, particularly reading achievement [Briggs and Walter 2016. "Read On! Extensive Reading and Young Second Language Learners' Motivation and Attitudes;" Masgoret and Gardner…

The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

Purpose: Previous research has indicated the beneficial effects of musical training on speech perception in children. However, little has been known about whether musical training exerts transfer effects on fine-grained perception of linguistic pitch and time information. This study aimed to investigate the effects of different musical training…

The spoken word production process includes four identifiable stages: conceptualization, lexical selection, form encoding, and articulation. This dissertation studies the spoken word production process of producing Mandarin monosyllabic words, focusing on lexical selection and form encoding. The Chinese languages, including Mandarin, differ from…

This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of using a flipped classroom (FC) approach to combine self-regulated learning (SRL) instruction and out-of-class eLearning activities in a two-year reading intervention program to facilitate students' learning of classical Chinese reading. A total of 352 junior secondary students from three…

Lexical tones are widely believed to be a formidable learning challenge for adult speakers of nontonal languages. While difficulties--as well as rapid improvements--are well documented for beginning second language (L2) learners, research with more advanced learners is needed to understand how tone perception difficulties impact word recognition…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated whether deaf and hearing writers differ in the processes and representations underlying written language production. Experiment 1 showed that deaf writers of Mandarin Chinese exhibited comparable extents of structural priming and comparable lexical boosts, suggesting that syntactic encoding…

This dissertation interrogates the representation of syntactic locality constraints, specifically intervention locality, within child grammar. Our focal point is the Intervention Hypothesis, which suggests that children are governed by a strict version of featural Relativized Minimality, leading to comprehension difficulties when partial featural…