The present study examined whether and how early cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic awareness, including phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), Chinese word reading (CWR), and listening comprehension (LC) influenced Chinese children's later reading comprehension. In total, 153 Chinese children were recruited. Path…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The…

To examine the processing of phonological and configurational information in word recognition in discourse reading, we conducted two experiments using the self-paced reading paradigm. The materials were three-sentence discourses, in each of which the last word of the second sentence and the third word from the end of the last sentence formed a…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Background: This study aims to empirically answer the question of whether the role of sub-reading skills changes depending on the test format (e.g., multiple-choice vs. open-ended reading questions). The test format effect also addresses the issue of test validity--whether the reading test properly elicits construct-relevant reading skills or…

This article reports results of a longitudinal study of vocabulary breadth knowledge growth, vocabulary fluency development, and the relationship between the two. We administered two versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT; Nation 1983; Nation 1990; Schmitt et al. 2001) to 300 students at a Chinese university at three different time points…

This study investigated the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary breadth and depth knowledge. One hundred and fifty first-year university students in China took the Vocabulary Levels Test, a meaning recall task, and the Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Test. The first two tests were used to elicit two types of vocabulary…

This study examined how language proficiency and age of acquisition affect a bilingual language user's reliance on the dominant language during lexical access. Two bilingual groups performed a translation recognition task: Mandarin-English classroom bilinguals who acquired their dominant language (Mandarin) from birth and their non-dominant…

English listening is seen as a vital means of linguistic input for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, which lays a solid foundation for English learning and communication with English speakers. Besides, with increasing of scores of the listening part in the newly-reformed CET-4 and CET-6 (CET refers to college English test in…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…