Hua Liu’s research while affiliated with University of California, San Diego and other places

A new procedure called single-word shadowing was applied to the study of lexical access in context. Subjects listened to word pairs or sentences recorded in one voice and were asked to repeat the target word signaled by a voice shift. This technique yielded rapid and robust priming effects in normal adult subjects in word pairs and in a sentence context. Regression analyses showed that the semantic priming effects were large and significant, even when several additional factors believed to affect lexical access were controlled. Evidence was found for robust semantic priming in the healthy elderly and in children from 7 to 11 years of age, and there was also evidence for a change in the size and nature of context effects across the lifespan. Because single-word shadowing works across a broad age range and does not require reading, secondary tasks, or metalinguistic judgments, it is a promising tool for the study of lexical access in a range of different populations.

The language-specific properties of Chinese provide a unique testgro-und for theories in sentence processing. This chapter examines the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying Chinese sentence comprehension processes with results from two experiments. First, an off-line experiment was designed to investigate how Chinese speakers use word order and animacy cues in processing simple sentences. The results are largely compatible with previous studies in that Chinese speakers rely more on animacy than on word order. Second, an on-line experiment was designed to tap into the role of word order, animacy, the object marker BA, and the passive marker BEI in real-time processing of Chinese sentences. Consistent with the results from the off-line experiment, this experiment shows that different cues play different roles in the interpretation process, but they interact with each other as a function of competition and convergence that correspond to the patterns of cue use in the language. These studies also provide clues to the dynamic properties of sentence processing in general.

This study examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English–Chinese bilinguals. Our results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese–English bilinguals transfer animacybased strategies to English sentences; late English–Chinese bilinguals transfer English-like word order strategies to Chinese. Early bilinguals display a variety of transfer patterns, including differentiation (use of animacy strategies in Chinese and word order strategies in English) and backward transfer (use of L2 processing strategies in L1, a possible symptom of language loss). These unusual transfer patterns reflect a complex interaction of variables, including age of exposure to L2 and patterns of daily language use. Implications of these findings for the critical period hypothesis are discussed, together with some new hypotheses concerning the interaction between acquisition of L2 and maintenance of L1.