Cover

Half-title

Title

Copyright

Contents

Figures

Notes on contributors

Preface

Introduction: new frontiers in Chinese psycholinguistics

Properties of the Chinese language

Overview of theoretical issues

Scope and structure of the handbook

Acknowledgments

Part I: Language acquisition

1 Actions and results in the acquisition of Cantonese verbs

General characterization of Cantonese

Early verbs in child Cantonese

Word order

Aspect markers, verbal particles, and compound causative verbs

Conclusion

2 Chinese children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles

Introduction

Challenges from the Chinese language and predictions for Chinese children’s acquisition of Binding Principles

Challenge to Principle A: Chinese ziji

Challenge to Principle B: Chinese ta

Research methods for investigating children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles

Major findings concerning children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles: English acquisition and Chinese acquisition

English-speaking children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles

Chinese children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles

Summary and conclusions

3 Chinese classifiers: their use and acquisition

Overview of classifiers

Classifiers as a system of noun categorization

Chinese classifiers

Types

Dictionaries

Semantic chains

Syntax

Sortal versus general classifier

Issues, debates, and contrasting theories

Approaches and methods

Experiments

Discussion

4 Child language acquisition of temporality in Mandarin Chinese

Introduction

The form-oriented approach

The acquisition of grammatical aspect markers

Grammatical and lexical aspect

The acquisition of temporal adverbs

The meaning-oriented approach

Conclusion

5 Second language acquisition by native Chinese speakers

Description of the L2 acquisition processes

Predictive variables of L2 proficiency

Age of L2 acquisition

Language environment and motivation

Linguistic backgrounds

Future research directions

6 Making explicit children’s implicit epilanguage in learning to read Chinese

Learning to read Chinese and manipulating speech sounds

Nature of phonology in Chinese

Effect of phonological processing on Chinese word reading

Participants and materials

Procedure

Summary results

Discussion

General discussion and implications

7 Emergent literacy skills in Chinese

Speed of processing and naming speed

Phonological awareness

Visual skills

Morphological awareness

Emergent literacy in Chinese and English

Summary and conclusion

8 Basic syntactic categories in early language development

Function words and content words: the most fundamental syntactic distinction

Acoustic and phonological cues to function words and content words in early language input

Derivation of content and function words: neural networks and human infants

Developmental changes in infants’ processing of content and function words

General discussion

9 Growth of orthography–phonology knowledge in the Chinese writing system

Introduction

Chinese phonetic compounds

Previous experimental studies

Previous corpus analyses

Properties of school Chinese characters

Children’s development of phonetic regularity knowledge

Children’s development of phonetic consistency knowledge

General discussion

10 Interaction of biological and environmental factors in phonological learning

Introduction

Universal patterns of development: implicational hierarchies

Articulatory and ambient language effects on segment emergence

Learning mechanisms

11 The importance of verbs in Chinese

Overview

Children’s early words: the importance of verbs in Chinese

Are they really “verbs”?

Prevalence of verbs in adult Chinese

Why do Chinese-speaking adults use more verbs and what does this imply for measuring language and for cognition?

Summary and conclusions

12 Grammar acquisition via parameter setting

Introduction

Parameter setting in formal models

Background

Triggering

Combating parametric ambiguity

Cue-based model

Structural triggers learner

Variational learner

Parameter setting in child language

Conclusion

13 Early bilingual acquisition in the Chinese context

Introduction

Study of bilingual acquisition in historical perspective

Methods

Language dominance

Language differentiation and crosslinguistic interaction in bilingual acquisition

Chinese–English bilingual acquisition in childhood

Earlier studies

Singapore studies of Chinese–English childhood bilingualism

Hong Kong studies of Cantonese–English childhood bilingualism

Bilingual acquisition and language contact

Conclusions and future studies

Part II: Language processing

14 Word-form encoding in Chinese speech production

Introduction

Morphological encoding

Phonological encoding

Phonological syllables are constructed on the fly: the Dutch case

Phonological syllables are stored: the Chinese case

Summary and conclusion

15 Effects of semantic radical consistency and combinability on Chinese character processing

Transparency and opacity in representing meaning with a semantic radical

Semantic radical combinability

Semantic radical consistency index

Experiments with Chinese semantic radicals

Method

Results and discussion

Summary and conclusion

16 Eye movement in Chinese reading: basic processes and crosslinguistic differences

A brief history

Basic characteristics of Chinese reading eye movements

Fixation duration

Saccade length

The perceptual span

Eye movements and orthography

Phonological activation when reading Chinese texts

Word boundaries and eye movement programming

Eye movements in beginning readers

Discussion

17 The Chinese character in psycholinguistic researchUnicodeCharacterx2009 : form, structure, and the reader

Introduction

Are Chinese characters like English words?

Compounding of single character bound forms

Parsing of characters into words

Classification of Chinese characters

Visual similarity

Stroke count

Position-based distortion

Traditional versus simplified characters

Component order

Components and their functions

Layout/position

Semantic transparency and consistency

Phonological considerations

Phonological transparency and consistency

Synchronic and diachronic bidialectalism

Final remarks

17 The Chinese character in psycholinguistic research: form, structure, and the reader

Introduction

Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Mandarin tones

Fundamental frequency

Temporal properties of tones

Amplitude

Tonal coarticulation

Interactions of tones, stress, and intonation

The influence of speaker F0 range

Hemispheric specialization for tone

Summary and future directions

19 Phonological mediation in visual word recognition in English and Chinese

Paradigms used for studying phonological mediation

Priming paradigm

Semantic categorization paradigm

Other paradigms

A matching paradigm for studying phonological mediation

Method

Results and discussion

General discussion

20 Reading Chinese characters: orthography, phonology, meaning, and the Lexical Constituency Model

The implications of Chinese for models of word reading

Semantics and phonology in the Chinese writing system

Identification with phonology in Chinese and English

The Lexical Constituency Model

The time course of constituent activation in naming

A network implementation of the Lexical Constituency Model

Implications of the model

Summary

21 Processing of characters by native Chinese readers

The architecture of the lexical processing system

Representation of free morphemes, bound morphemes, and binding characters

The orthography–phonology linkage

The nature of the orthographic subsystem

Inhibitory links

Conclusion

22 L2 acquisition and processing of Mandarin tones

Introduction

L2 production of Mandarin tones

L2 perception of Mandarin tones

Training perception and production of tone in the laboratory

Non-native processing of Mandarin tones

Summary and future directions

23 The comprehension of coreference in Chinese discourse

Psycholinguistic research on the local coherence of discourse

Lexical features

Discourse prominence and referent accessibility

Coreference in Chinese

Lexical features

Discourse prominence

Conclusion

24 Lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese sentence processing

Lexical ambiguity resolution: a test bench for modular/interactive theories

Research paradigms for lexical ambiguity resolution

Crossmodal priming

Single-modal (visual–visual) priming

Eye-tracking and eye-movement priming

Event-related potentials measurements

Computer simulations

Some characteristics of lexical ambiguity in Chinese

Lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese sentence processing: an overview

The interaction between sentence context and dominance

The effects of relatedness of multiple meanings

Inhibitory processes in the resolution of lexical ambiguity in Chinese

Directions for the future

Part III: Language and the brain

25 The relationship between language and cognition

The relationship between language and cognition

Can we think without language?

Can language shape thought?

The Chinese story

The why’s of interpersonal events

Counterfactual reasoning

Whorfian renaissance?

26 Language processing in bilinguals as revealed by functional imaging: a contemporary synthesis

Introduction

Studies on bilinguals in clinical populations

fMRI and PET imaging studies and interhemispheric or intrahemispheric differences in second language processing

Logographs and words

Relative language proficiency/familiarity is an important consideration when comparing processing in different languages

Frequency of exposure and word-level proficiency

Are there limits to acquiring native-speaker levels of performance in one’s second language?

Linguistic experience and brain activation

Summary

27 Specific language impairment in Chinese

Introduction

Explaining specific language impairment

Genetic studies

Neurological factors

Psycholinguistic perspectives

Specific language impairment in Cantonese

Aspect markers in SLI in Cantonese

Phonological character

Grammatical and lexical aspect

Optionality

Conclusion

28 Brain mapping of Chinese speech prosody

Introduction

Background and significance

PET/fMRI results

Tone

Intonation

Emotion

Conclusions

Directions for future research

29 Modeling language acquisition and representation: connectionist networks

Connectionism: an overview

Connectionist representation and learning

Connectionist language processing

Lexical representations in self-organizing connectionist networks

A self-organizing model of the lexicon

Modeling character acquisition

Modeling lexical category formation

Modeling bilingual language processing

Concluding remarks

30 The manifestation of aphasia syndromes in Chinese

Introduction

The aphasia syndromes

Broca’s aphasia

Wernicke’s aphasia

Other aphasias

The manifestation of syndromes in Chinese

Fluency, effort, and phrase length in Chinese aphasia

Phonology: tone in Chinese aphasia

Function words in Mandarin

Use of de in Chinese aphasia

“Second-position” modifiers and their use in Chinese aphasia

The use of other function words in Chinese aphasia

Chinese complex words and word components

Words in Chinese aphasia

Chinese syntax

Agrammatism in Chinese

Summary

31 Naming of Chinese phonograms: from cognitive science to cognitive neuroscience

Introduction

Behavioral studies

The regularity effect of Chinese character pronunciation: phonological information from the sublexical unit

The consistency effect of Chinese phonograms: phonological information from the lexicon

The time course of phonograms’ pronunciation

Development of regularity and consistency effects in Chinese children

Computer simulation

Neuroscience studies

Conclusions

32 How the brain reads the Chinese language: recent neuroimaging findings

The neuro-anatomical system for Chinese reading

Neural bases of phonological processing in written Chinese

Biological abnormality of impaired Chinese reading

Functional connectivity of brain regions mediating Chinese reading

Anatomical differences between English-speaking Caucasians and Chinese-speaking Asians

Conclusions

Epilogue: a tribute to Elizabeth Bates

References

Name index

Subject index