Purpose: We examined the effect of character complexity on early Chinese literacy (word reading and writing). We also investigated whether cognitive skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming [RAN]) could moderate the influence of character complexity on literacy outcomes. Method: Our pre-registered study…

Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the…

Robust relation has been revealed previously between the components of executive function (EF) and reading comprehension performance. However, the specific role of EF in the reading processes remains relatively underexplored. Within the framework of the lexical quality hypothesis (LQH), this study examined the contribution of EF to the lexical…

The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners' language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirmed. This study investigated whether toddlers' word processing was affected by tone hyperarticulation in the IDS of a tone language. Nineteen- and…

The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

Although translation may be considered the "sine qua non" of bilingual legislation, the perceived authenticity and equivalence of different language versions of the same law are contingent on the disavowal of translation. Yet precisely because of such disavowal, translated versions of law are paradoxically valorized as equal in meaning…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

Strategy use is a critical competence for academic achievement and problem solving in globalised and information-based knowledge economies. It involves skills such as synthesising information from task source materials and elaborating on interlocutors' viewpoints during integrated group discussions. However, evidence from empirical studies on this…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

Purpose: Although variability of training materials has the potential to benefit the learning of lexical tones, the benefit is contingent on an individual's pitch aptitude. Previous studies did not segregate immediate learning and consolidation after an overnight interval, and little is known about how pitch aptitude differences affect…

The present study investigated the influence of morphological structure information on the memorization of Chinese subordinate and coordinative compound words using the memory conjunction error paradigm. During the Study Phase, Hong Kong Chinese college students were asked to either judge the word class (Exp. 1, N = 25) or the orthographic…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with…