In two experiments, we tested whether using a foreign language attenuates neophobia at the lexical (Experiment 1) and discoursal (Experiment 2) levels in comparison to using a native language. A total of 687 native Chinese speakers participated in Experiment 1, and 693 in Experiment 2. All of them learned English as a foreign language. They…

Increasing numbers of Chinese students are pursuing graduate degrees in Catalonia. Although highly proficient in both Castilian and English when they arrive, they find themselves in a bilingual society where Catalan, not Castilian, predominates both at universities and in the broader social context. Acquiring Catalan is hence important for both…

Chinese-English dual language learners (Chinese DLLs) are a growing population in the US. Existing studies of preschool-aged Chinese DLLs mostly focused on single-word vocabulary and rarely explored other skills important for school readiness. In the current study, we examined Chinese DLLs' development of receptive vocabulary and comprehension of…

Embodied cognition holds that one's body, actions, perceptions, and situations are integrated into the cognitive process and emphasizes the fact that sensorimotor systems play a role in language comprehension. Previous studies verified the embodied effect in literal language processing but few of them paid attention to metaphors in embodied…

The U.S. government identifies Chinese as one of the 15 critical languages important for the nation's economic competitiveness and security interests (U.S. Department of Education, p.1). Consequently, the U.S. government has funded Chinese language programs through the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) to increase the number of U.S.…

Proverbs are maxims that reflect the values, beliefs, and cultural heritage of a society. This study attempted to conduct ethnocultural analysis of two concepts, marriage and family, in the Chinese Paremiology. The topics of 'marriage' and 'family' are extensively covered in Chinese proverbs; hence this study aimed to find out how Chinese proverbs…

In this study, we examined the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character reading in Chinese kindergarten children. One hundred and twenty children were assessed in each of their three years at the kindergarten, with 12-month intervals in between. Using cross-lagged panel modeling, we found that:…

Due to the growth of China's social economy and culture, the demand for psychology is becoming more and more urgent. Environmental health is the unity of people's behavioral health that constitutes the environment and environmental conditions that meet people's basic needs. In this paper, the improved a priori algorithm is combined with…

Based on the bilingual children's and adults' code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children's CS and compares them with bilingual adults'. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest…

Previous work has predominantly focused on word reading in studying literacy difficulties; very little work has focused on spelling difficulty instead. The present study adopted spelling (dictation) as the criterion to classify poor literacy skills in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. We examined the cognitive-linguistic skills…

Translation is a critical issue in international mathematics education studies but has seldom been carefully investigated. How can a theoretical approach be translated and subsequently used in different languages, and to what extent could the translation processes deepen the approach itself? This paper addresses such issues in the case of the…

Frequency and proficiency have been found to play an important role in second language (L2) phrasal processing. However, existing research has largely focused on English and other European languages, with other commonly used languages, such as Chinese, being largely disregarded. To fill this gap, we carried out two experiments to investigate how…

To investigate whether audiovisual associative learning uniquely contributed to Chinese character reading (accuracy and fluency), the current study examined it along with phonological processing skills, including phonological memory, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming (hereafter, RAN). Hierarchical regression analyses found that…

Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

Background: Visual attention span (VAS) refers to the number of visual elements processed simultaneously in a multielement array. Yet, there are mixed findings regarding VAS deficit in developmental dyslexia (DD) across different tasks, stimuli, languages, control groups, and ages. Aim: The present meta-analysis aimed to investigate VAS deficit in…