A study examined the validity of the distinction between interactional language, used to express social relations and personal attitudes, and transactional language, which conveys factual or prepositional information and is message oriented, within and across languages and cultures. Data were drawn from natural telephone conversations of three…

A cross-cultural study examined preschoolers' knowledge of elementary components of the writing system. Subjects were 41 Chinese and 44 American preschool students between the ages of 2 and 4. The students were presented with sets of cards depicting familiar objects, capitalized English letters, and Chinese characters and were asked to turn each…

A study investigated how Cantonese children acquire word order in the locative system, which is very complex in their native language. Focus was on three semantic categories: static location, locative source, and locative goal. Subjects were 32 monolingual Cantonese children aged 2.5 to 5.9 in four age groups. Each subject performed four tasks,…

Based on personal experience, this paper examines the ambiguities of the Likert-type 5-point scale in learning strategy elicitation. Four parallel questionnaires consisting of the same batch of 20 items taken from the Oxford scale (1990) were administered among a group of 120 tertiary level, non-English majors in China. Questionnaire 1 used the…

Trends and developments in computer applications in Chinese language research are described, focusing on these areas: input of Chinese characters and Chinese corpus; automatic segmentation of Chinese written text in corpus; development of a grammar knowledge base for Chinese words to be used as a resource for text segmentation and corpus…