Non-native Chinese Speakers Research Articles

Semantic effects on the perception of emotional prosody in native and non-native Chinese speakers

ABSTRACT While previous research has found an in-group advantage (IGA) favouring native speakers in emotional prosody perception over non-native speakers, the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception in Chinese words and sentences for native and non-native Chinese speakers. The critical manipulation was the congruence of prosodic (positive, negative) and semantic (positive, negative, and neutral) valence. Participants listened to a series of audio clips and judged whether the emotional prosody was positive or negative for each utterance. The results revealed an IGA effect: native speakers perceived emotional prosody more accurately and quickly than non-native speakers in Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, a semantic congruence effect was observed in Chinese words, where both native and non-native speakers recognised emotional prosody more accurately in the semantic-prosody congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. However, in Chinese sentences, this congruence effect was only present for non-native speakers. Additionally, the IGA effect and semantic congruence effect on emotional prosody perception were influenced by prosody valence. These findings illuminate the role of semantics in emotional prosody perception, highlighting perceptual differences between native and non-native Chinese speakers.

Exploring Affirmative-negative Question from the Sociolinguistic Perspective

Affirmative-negative question is special in Chinese interrogative systems, with various syntactic forms, and it is also the key and difficult point in teaching Chinese grammar, but it has research gaps in analyzing affirmative-negative questions from a sociolinguistic perspective. This paper used the questionnaire method, collecting 176 questionnaires to analyze and discuss three points of affirmative-negative questions different forms of acceptance level, target audience and usage errors in sociolinguistic aspect and reached three conclusions. Firstly, people are not accustomed to using VP+(never) in modern social life. They tend to accept the usage of VP+(not)/(not yet)+VP. Secondly, people prefer to use affirmative-negative questions with their peers rather than superiors or teachers since the affirmative-negative question represents an unpolite and questioning attitude to some extent. Thirdly, when distinguishing different types of affirmative-negative questions people may have some confusion and errors, even though they are native Chinese speakers. Thus, this paper proposes some suggestions to help identify the differences clearly for people, including non-native Chinese speakers. This paper plays an inspired role in affirmative-negative questions in sociolinguistic research areas, and it contributes to teaching and learning the Chinese interrogative sentences system.

Teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers: A scoping review

The complexity of Chinese characters and the differences in learners’ cultural backgrounds make the process of teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers of Chinese challenging. This review provides a comprehensive examination of five key strategies used in this instructional context: individualized instruction, contextualized instruction, technology-assisted instruction, innovative materials and resource development, and interdisciplinary integration. The ultimate approach to teaching non-native speakers of Chinese may come from the effective integration of these five strategies, so future research should focus on developing integrated instructional models that effectively combine these strategies. Further empirical research is also needed to verify the effectiveness of these strategies and to refine their implementation in different educational contexts.

Proficiency Test Training for Mandarin Learners in Surakarta

Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) or the Chinese Language Proficiency Test is an international standardized test in Chinese language proficiency. It is used to assess non-native Chinese speakers’ ability in using the Chinese language in their daily, academic, and professional lives. The purpose of administering training activities for the HSK Mandarin competency test is to help Mandarin language learners know the importance and benefits of the Mandarin language proficiency test (HSK) and where the certificate is used as one of the requirements to continue to a higher education level. It is also used to assess Mandarin language proficiency when applying to better job opportunities. The participants of this research are the teachers and students of SMA Bina Widya Solo where their learning system is at the HSK 4 level. The results showed that the students and the teachers of SMA Bina Widya Solo are more open to perspectives about the benefits of the HSK competency test as an instrument of measuring language skills that are internationally certified.
 Keywords: counseling, training, HSK, Mandarin language

Component awareness facilitates Chinese character recognition in non-native Chinese speakers: analysis of the multiple mediation effect

Component awareness facilitates Chinese character recognition in non-native Chinese speakers: analysis of the multiple mediation effect

Semantic Preview Benefit of Tibetan-Chinese Bilinguals during Chinese Reading

ABSTRACT When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual information. However, whether non-native Chinese readers who are more proficient in Chinese can make use of high-level parafoveal information remains unknown. Therefore, this study examined parafoveal processing during Chinese reading among Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals with high Chinese proficiency and compared their PB effects with those from native Chinese readers. Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals demonstrated both orthographic and semantic PB but did not show phonological PB and only differed from native Chinese in the identical PB when preview characters were identical to the targets. These findings demonstrate that non-native Chinese readers can extract semantic information from parafoveal preview during Chinese reading and highlight the modulation of parafoveal processing efficiency by reading proficiency. The results are in line with the direct route to access the mental lexicon of visual Chinese characters among non-native Chinese speakers.

Teaching Semantic Radicals Facilitates Inferring New Character Meaning in Sentence Reading for Nonnative Chinese Speakers.

This study investigates the effects of teaching semantic radicals in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar characters among nonnative Chinese speakers. A total of 54 undergraduates majoring in Chinese Language from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam, who had 1 year of learning experience in Chinese were assigned to two experimental groups that received instructional intervention, called “old-for-new” semantic radical teaching, through two counterbalanced sets of semantic radicals, with one control group. All of the students completed pre- and post-tests of a sentence cloze task where they were required to choose an appropriate character that fit the sentence context among four options. The four options shared the same phonetic radicals but had different semantic radicals. The results showed that the pre-test and post-test score increases were significant for the experimental groups, but not for the control group. Most importantly, the experimental groups successfully transferred the semantic radical strategy to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar characters containing semantic radicals that had not been taught. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching semantic radicals for lexical inference in sentence reading for nonnative speakers, and highlight the ability of transfer learning to acquire semantic categories of sub-lexical units (semantic radicals) in Chinese characters among foreign language learners.

‘好好(兒)的’의 문법기능과 의미특징 연구

‘hǎohāor+de’ is composed of the syntactic superimposed form ‘hǎohāor’ and the structural auxiliary word ‘de.’ It is a structure that occurs very frequently in modern spoken Chinese. ‘hǎohāor’ can only act as an adverbial (have a good time) or an attribute (a quite good book in a sentence). ‘hǎohāor’ cannot be used alone, or act as a subject, an object or a predicate. Nor can it modify a noun or a noun phrase directly. However, ‘hǎohāor+de’ can be used alone, and can be used as a predicate, a complement, an attribute and an adverbial. Different syntactic functions of ‘hǎohāor+de’ have different semantic features. This is a difficult point for the students who are non-native speakers of Chinese. This paper discusses in detail the syntactic functions and the related semantic features of ‘hǎohāor+de,’ and also tries to probe into the source of it, hoping to provide some help for Chinese language teaching.

Frequency, contingency and online processing of multiword sequences: An eye-tracking study

Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co-occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it also examines language users’ sensitivity to the two types of statistical information. Using the eye-tracking paradigm, native and advanced nonnative speakers of Chinese were instructed to read 80 disyllabic two-word Chinese adverbial sequences embedded in sentence contexts. Eye movements of the participants were recorded using both early and late measures. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that both phrasal frequency and contingency influenced the processing of the adverbial sequences; however, they were likely to function in different time windows. In addition, both native and nonnative speakers were sensitive to the phrasal frequency and contingency of the sequences, though their degrees of such sensitivity differed. Our findings suggest that adult language learners retain the statistical learning ability in second language acquisition and they may share a general statistical learning mechanism with native speakers when processing multiword sequences.

The Investigation of Learning Strategies of American Learners of Chinese and Japanese for Character Learning

It has been widely recognized that Chinese and Japanese languages are exceptionally difficult to learn. One of the reasons is their logographic characters (i.e. hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese) that are extremely different from alphabet-based orthography (Tong & Yip, 2015; Xu & Padilla, 2013). Accordingly, there have been research investigating how L2 learners of Chinese and Japanese deal with the difficulty by exploring learners’ strategy (Gamage, 2003; Shen, 2005). However, learning strategies for a certain aspect of characters (i.e. shape, sound) have not been investigated as much as learning strategies in general (but see Shen, 2005). In addition, there are limited longitudinal research exploring how learners change their strategies. Therefore, the researchers investigate strategies that L2 learners of American university students are using most frequently for Chinese and Japanese character learning. The study had 66 L2 learners taking either Chinese or Japanese course at an American university. They took a questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of a semester. It was found that reading, context, decomposition, rote-writing, and listening were the most frequently used strategies. Moreover, the results indicated that strategies vary depending on which aspect of characters they learn. Furthermore, learners did not change their learning strategies over three months to a notable extent.
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The same or different: An investigation of cognitive and metalinguistic correlates of Chinese word reading for native and non-native Chinese speaking children

We investigated cognitive and metalinguistic correlates of Chinese word reading in children with L2 Chinese learning experience and compared these to those in L1 Chinese speaking children. In total, 102 third and fourth grade children were recruited for the study. We examined a range of Chinese and English word reading related cognitive and metalinguistic skills. Compared to the native Chinese speaking group (NCSS), the non-native Chinese speaking group (NNCS) only performed better in English vocabulary knowledge and English working memory. On Chinese word reading related skills the NNCS group performed significantly worse than the NCS group. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the unique correlates of Chinese word reading for both groups were Chinese vocabulary, working memory, lexical tone awareness, and orthographic skills. For the NNCS group only, visual skills were also unique correlates of word reading skills. The results suggest cognitive similarities and differences in reading among native and non-native Chinese speakers.

International Students' Perception of Library Services and Information Resources in Chinese Academic Libraries

With the growth of international student enrollment in Chinese universities, user perception has become an area of developing research in academic libraries. China's policy of opening up has led to the education and economic reforms allowing major universities to enroll international students. These changes have created an increasing need for libraries to be responsive to the information needs of these students.In order to serve these students better, universities will be expected to further understand how academic library services are currently perceived by international students. This is particularly the case at Wuhan University, which has experienced significant growth in international student enrollment. This study aims to discover the met and unmet needs as well as barriers encountered in library use by international students. Based on the information gathered, recommendations and future strategies will be formulated to improve the understanding of the information needs of non-native Chinese speakers in both the provision of services and the building of collections.The findings of this study reveal that Chinese academic libraries are considerably well perceived by international students. It also indicates that they have differing purposes, and differing needs for library services and information resources. This paper acknowledges that the study is limited to Wuhan University; however, there is a need for further studies on non-Chinese speakers, particularly, international students to obtain important information on their perception of library services and information resources.

Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text.

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces.

Synaesthesia in a logographic language: The colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings

Studies of linguistic synaesthesias in English have shown a range of fine-grained language mechanisms governing the associations between colours on the one hand, and graphemes, phonemes and words on the other. However, virtually nothing is known about how synaesthetic colouring might operate in non-alphabetic systems. The current study shows how synaesthetic speakers of Mandarin Chinese come to colour the logographic units of their language. Both native and non-native Chinese speakers experienced synaesthetic colours for characters, and for words spelled in the Chinese spelling systems of Pinyin and Bopomo. We assessed the influences of lexical tone and Pinyin/Bopomo spelling and showed that synaesthetic colours are assigned to Chinese words in a non-random fashion. Our data show that Chinese-speaking synaesthetes with very different native languages can exhibit both differences and similarities in the ways in which they come to colour their Chinese words.

Non-native speech processing in children with phonological disorders.

This study examined how children with and without phonological disorders (PD) process accented speech spoken by a non-native speaker. Two research questions were asked in this project. First was to compare how children with and without PD perform on accented speech and second was to investigate whether the exposure to the accented speech allows children’s increase in overall performance. Children were aged from 3 to 8 years old who were native English speakers. The task was to identify the final words of low- and high-context sentences spoken by two non-native Chinese speakers. Overall, it is expected that older children perform better than younger children and children perform better on high- than low-context sentences which shows children’s ability to use contextual cues. For the first research question, it is hypothesized that typical children will outperform children with PD when processing accented speech which suggests unstable phonological representation in children with PD. For the second research question, it is hypothesized that children in both groups will benefit when exposed to the accented speech for the second time. However, whether children with PD will require more time to adapt to accented speech compared to typical children is of interest in the discussion.

Metacognitive beliefs and strategies in learning Chinese as a foreign language

The study investigates the effects of second-year university students’ metacognitive beliefs and strategies on learning Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). The analysis shows that metacognitive beliefs, which identify students who are confident about their ability to learn a foreign language, are positively associated with students’ CFL achievement results. Successful students are found to have confidence in their abilities. Metacognitive strategies also influence students’ CFL achievement results. Students who show self-regulation by monitoring their progress, persevering at tasks and setting realistic goals are more successful. These are strategies that are essential for learners who wish to assume responsibility for their language learning. The study confirms Shen’s (Shen, H.H., 2005. An investigation of Chinese character learning strategies among non-native speakers of Chinese. System, 33, 49–68) conclusion that students should be encouraged to analyse their own learning processes in order to improve their metacognitive learning strategies, which will reinforce motivational aspects of self-efficacy. The pedagogical implications of the study are that teachers can help students to think about what happens during the CFL learning process and identify effective strategies, leading to improved language learning and higher levels of self-esteem and confidence.

An investigation of Chinese-character learning strategies among non-native speakers of chinese

Abstract This study first identifies commonly used Chinese character learning strategies employed by non-native (English-speaking) learners of Chinese and generalizes about the factors underlying these commonly used strategies. Then, it defines linear trends between learning levels and students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the commonly used strategies grouped by the factors in the learning of characters. Ninety-five non-native speakers in Chinese classes from the beginning through the advanced Chinese classes participated in the study. Based on a descriptive analysis of a survey of character-learning strategies, thirty strategies are identified as commonly used by the learners. A factor analysis revealed that among these commonly used strategies, the orthographic knowledge-based cognitive strategies are the most commonly used, while metacognitive strategies related to structured preview and review are the second most commonly used. A regression analysis showed that linear trends exist between learning levels and learners’ perceptions of the usefulness of strategies in the two groups.