Lijuan Liang

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies · Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab; Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

In the present study, we reported two experiments that examined how syntactic category information affects the acquisition of ambiguous words in second language (L2). Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to learn a set of English pseudowords to simulate ambiguous words’ learning process. Each ambiguous pseudoword was paired with two unrelated...

The present study investigated the age of acquisition (AoA) effect in processing second language (L2) words and how it is related to the AoA of the corresponding first language (L1) words. We adopted a lexical decision task in three experiments. The filler words were orthographically illegal in Experiment 1 to elicit more word form processing, whil...

This cross-sectional study investigated the development of second language (L2) syntactic processing and the role of inhibitory control in Chinese-English bilingual children. Participants included students from the 5th grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, and undergraduates (i.e., the control group). They were asked to perform a syntactic grammaticality ju...

Aims The present study investigated whether bilinguals differing in L2 proficiency are different in their non-native phonetic perception mechanism. Methodology An event-related potential (ERP) experiment was conducted, in which high and low L2 proficiency bilinguals were asked to focus their attention on a muted film while listening pre-attentivel...

Previous study has found that previously learned meaning affects the learning of new meaning for known second language (L2) words. However, it is not clear whether learning a new meaning also affects the previously learned meaning and whether this effect is modulated by the semantic similarity between them. The current study aimed to explore this i...

Objectives An experiment was conducted to explore how emotional valence of contexts and exposure frequency of novel words affect second language (L2) contextual word learning. Methodology Chinese native speakers who learned English in a formal classroom setting were asked to read English paragraphs with different emotional valence (positive, negat...

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages, but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during L2 sentence processing. The p...

Ambiguous words have multiple meanings. How these multiple meanings interact with each other during ambiguous word learning remains unclear. The current study adopted an event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to explore whether there is an interaction between two meanings when learning second language (L2) ambiguous words and how semantic simila...

Aims The present study aimed to explore the impact of L2 proficiency on the time course and neural basis of L2 semantic access. Methodology Two groups of participants with either high or low L2 proficiency performed a picture–word semantic matching task (i.e. consistent vs. inconsistent), with their event-related potentials (ERP) responses being r...

Previous studies have suggested that bilingual production experience has beneficial effects on executive functions. In the current study, four experiments were conducted to investigate whether bilingual comprehension experience influences executive functions. In Experiments 1 and 2, Chinese–English bilinguals completed a flanker task interleaved wi...

China has launched a nation-wide project of learning English as a “core” subject starting from the third grade in primary schools after the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education at the beginning of this century. However, EFL teachers are far from sufficient in rural schools, and thus stude...

Previous behavioral research indicates that native speakers of Chinese are not very sensitive to lexical gender information, and one question that remains is how the rule of gender constraint functions in L1 and L2 reflexive pronoun resolution by Chinese-English bilinguals. To answer the question, the present study conducted two ERP experiments in...

Previous studies have found quantity of exposure, i.e., frequency of exposure (Horst et al., 1998; Webb, 2008; Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt, 2010), is important for second language (L2) contextual word learning. Besides this factor, context constraint and L2 proficiency level have also been found to affect contextual word learning (Pulido, 2003; Te...

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ER...

Aims The present study examined the effect of language-related executive control ability on second language (L2) metaphor comprehension in L2 learners. Design All participants were Chinese–English bilinguals. The Stroop task was used to measure language-related executive control ability. Three types of sentences were used as stimulus materials, in...

Aims This study aimed to investigate how individuals’ inhibitory control (IC) ability affects language switching in the initial period of language learning. Design Using a pretest/posttest design and event-related potential (ERP) methodology, we investigated the effect of IC on Chinese–English bilinguals during their language switching between Chi...

The present study adopted a face-to-face dialogue approach to investigate the modulatory role of inhibition during quasi language switching. Pairs of Chinese–English unbalanced bilinguals with measured inhibitory control (IC) abilities took turns to talk about assigned conversational topics in three conditions: L2 only (L2-only order), switching fr...

Objectives/research questions The present study focused on the performance of Chinese learners of English to investigate the activation of morpho-semantic information in the early processing of second language (L2) morphologically complex words when participants’ first language (L1) and L2 are typologically different. Methodology We used forward m...

Aims The present study adopted the electroencephalogram (EEG) technique to investigate whether inhibition advantage could modulate different language switches, regardless of the time spent on second language learning. Design The inhibitory control (IC) ability of 80 low-proficient Chinese (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals was assessed by the Simon task...

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the distributive effect when producing subject-verb agreement in English as a second language (L2) when the participant's first language either does or does not require subject-verb agreement. Both Chinese-English and Uygur-English bilinguals were included in Experiment 1. Chinese has no required subj...

Metalinguistic awareness is defined as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language. The present paper first introduced the operational definition and the measuring tools of metalinguistic awareness, and talked about the transfer of metalinguistic awareness across the native language and the second language. Then, th...