Cross-linguistic studies found that reading comprehension correlates with oral reading prosody. The study examined whether text difficulty would be involved in oral reading prosody in orthographically deep languages like Mandarin. One hundred and three fourth-grade children were recruited in Taipei, Taiwan. Their oral reading prosody was elicited…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

The questions of which strategies are determined and/or used for cello performance in Turkish Music, in which circumstances and how the determined strategies are used can only be answered through a qualitative research. Therefore, this study is structured as a qualitative study. The study has primarily revealed the strategies used by students; the…

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by Chinese students learning Thai through the "Tone Application", and conducts an attitude test towards the use of the Tone Application. A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by the participants with 40 native Thai speakers was also conducted. The acoustic…

The teaching of spoken Chinese in the context of post-primary education in Ireland faces several complexities. Learners of Mandarin Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL), including both Irish and heritage learners, have demonstrated difficulty in learning spoken Chinese. This exploratory research is part of a larger project which aims to develop…

It is commonly believed that second language (L2) acquisition of lexical tones presents a major challenge for learners from nontonal language backgrounds. This belief is somewhat at odds with research that consistently shows beginning learners making quick gains through focused tone training, as well as research showing advanced learners achieving…

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with…

This study examined analytical pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching pronunciation and lexical tones of Chinese characters) skills in 54 Mandarin-speaking fourth graders by using an invented spelling instrument that tapped into syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, lexical tones, and tone sandhi in Chinese. Pinyin invented spelling…

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…