Classifier systems constitute one of the most prominent features of East and South-East Asian languages (Li, 2013). Classifiers categorize referent nouns based on salient semantic features such as humanness, animacy, shape, or others (Aikhenvald and Mihas, 2019). The work described in this dissertation constitutes a thorough quantitative…

Purposes: Investigating the contribution of each component of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) to the aphasia quotient (AQ) helps better understand the mechanisms of change in the AQ. Previous studies on patients with English-speaking aphasia have shown that spontaneous speech contributes the most to the AQ. However, the same conclusion may not…

In the digital age, handwriting literacy has declined to a worrying degree, especially in non-alphabetic writing systems. In particular, Chinese (and also Japanese) handwriters have suffered from character amnesia ([Chinese characters omitted]), where people cannot correctly produce a character though they can recognize it. Though character…

It has been reported that children's comprehension of complex structures is affected by temporary ambiguity. Yet, much less is known about its effect on children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs). To fill this gap, the present study focused on Mandarin RCs, where temporary ambiguity often plays a role in the comprehension of…

Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic…

Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study…

The study aimed to explore spoken language and executive function (EF) characteristics in 3-5-year-old prelingually deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children, and evaluate the impact of demographic variables and EF on spoken language skills. 48 DHH children and 48 typically developing children who use auditory-oral communication were recruited. All…

Purpose: Following the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) framework, the current study investigated the active ingredients in the modified semantic feature analysis (mSFA) targeting either noun or verb retrieval in Mandarin-English bilingual adults with aphasia (BWA). Method: Twelve Mandarin-English BWA completed mSFA treatment…

This study explores translanguaging practices in a K-5 Mandarin Foreign Language in Elementary School (FLES) program in the United States. Using an ethnographic case study approach, it examined how a Mandarin teacher enacted translanguaging practices in two fourth-grade Mandarin classrooms and explored the affordances these practices provided for…

There is considerable lab-based evidence for successful incidental learning, in which a learner's attention is directed away from the to-be-learned stimulus and towards another stimulus. In this study, we extend incidental learning research into the language learning classroom. Three groups of adult second language (L2) learners (N = 52) engaged…

Mandarin is a tone language that is spoken by billions of people in the world. Despite huge demand, there is a lack of assessment and treatment tools targeting Mandarin speakers with communication disorders. To better understand the speech profile of Mandarin speakers with communication disorders, this dissertation first examined contrastive…

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has been offering unprecedented opportunities for language education. However, its capacity to embrace linguistic diversity, particularly for learners of dialect-rich languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin, remains underexamined. Without careful consideration, GenAI risks reinforcing language hegemonies,…

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 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…