Siruo Zhou’s research while affiliated with Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and other places

ChatGPT has been demonstrated to possess significant capabilities in generating intricate human-like text, and recent studies have established that its performance in theory of mind (ToM) tasks is strikingly comparable to a nine-year-old child’s. However, it remains unknown whether ChatGPT outperforms children of this age group in Chinese writing, a task credibly related to ToM. To justify the claim, this study compared ChatGPT with nine-year-old children in making Chinese compositions (i.e., science-themed and nature-themed narratives), aiming to unveil the relative advantages and disadvantages by human writers and ChatGPT in Chinese writing. Based on the evaluative framework comprising of four indices (i.e., fluency, accuracy, complexity, and cohesion) to test writing quality, this study added an often-overlooked index “emotion” to extend the framework. Afterward, we collected 120 writing samples produced by ChatGPT and children and used the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) for data analysis and comparison. The results revealed that this age group of children surpassed ChatGPT in fluency and cohesion while ChatGPT transcended the children in accuracy. With respect to complexity, the children exhibited better skills in science-themed writing, but ChatGPT better in nature-themed writing. Most importantly, this study unlocked the pioneering discovery that children display more potent emotional expressions than ChatGPT in Chinese writing, providing an instance of evidence that ChatGPT is really even poorer than a nine-year-old child in ToM to some extent.

Since the documentary A Bite of China (i. e. Shejian shang de Zhongguo ( 《舌尖上的中国》), where shejian shang literally means “on the tip of the tongue”), was broadcast in May 2012, a great number of expressions like shejian shang de Russia/world/Olympics/safety have begun to gradually converge into a novel modifier-head construction Shejian Shang de X , illustrating a typical evolution of modern Chinese.This study aims to analyze the construction’s meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Our investigation and analysis indicate that (1) Shejian Shang de X differs from the classic Chinese construction PP de X in both semantics and syntax; (2) as a modifier-head construction, Shejian Shang de X shows its variations in the head X’s multiple category options (noun, verb and adjective), therefore extending the scope of nominalization in Chinese and simultaneously triggering the construction’s diversified meanings; (3) the construction’s non-compositionality results mainly from its modifier components shejian and shang and is in general construed metonymically and metaphorically; (4) as a whole, the construction is a double-scope network consisting of two different organizing frames: the frame of shejian (“tip of the tongue”), a body part term and the frame of X, a dynamically changing entity (physical or abstract). The surface semantic incompatibility between the modifier and the head can be solved only by virtue of conceptual blending, producing the novel meaning [X relevant to the function of the tip of the tongue] of the whole construction.

ChatGPT is a publicly available chatbot that can quickly generate texts on given topics, but it remains unknown whether the chatbot is as good as or even superior to human writers in all aspects of writing, and whether the chatbot's writing quality can be significantly improved by updating commands. To investigate these issues, this study compared writing performance on a narrative topic by ChatGPT and Chinese intermediate English (CIE) learners so as to reveal the chatbot's advantages and disadvantages in writing. The data were analyzed by virtue of the five discourse components using Coh-Metrix (a special instrument for analyzing language discourse), and the results revealed that ChatGPT performed better than human writers in narrativity, word concreteness, and referential cohesion, but worse in syntactic simplicity and deep cohesion in its initial version. After its commands were updated, the resulting version was better in its syntactic simplicity, but it still lagged far behind the CIE learners’ writing in deep cohesion. In addition, a correlation analysis of the discourse components suggests that narrativity was correlated with referential cohesion for both ChatGPT and the human writers, but the correlations varied within each group.

ChatGPT is a publicly available chatbot that can quickly generate texts on given topics, but it is unknown whether the chatbot is really superior to human writers in all aspects of writing and whether its writing quality can be prominently improved on the basis of updating commands. Consequently, this study compared the writing performance on a narrative topic by ChatGPT and Chinese intermediate English (CIE) learners so as to reveal the chatbot's advantage and disadvantage in writing. The data were analyzed in terms of five discourse components using Coh-Metrix (a special instrument for analyzing language discourses), and the results revealed that ChatGPT performed better than human writers in narrativity, word concreteness, and referential cohesion, but worse in syntactic simplicity and deep cohesion in its initial version. After more revision commands were updated, while the resulting version was facilitated in syntactic simplicity, yet it is still lagged far behind CIE learners' writing in deep cohesion. In addition, the correlation analysis of the discourse components suggests that narrativity was correlated with referential cohesion in both ChatGPT and human writers, but the correlations varied within each group.

Peer feedback is essential in writing English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL). Traditionally, offline PF was more widely favored but nowadays online peer feedback (OPF) has become frequent in ESL/EFL learners’ daily writing. This study is undertaken to probe into the gains of using OPF in ESL/EFL writing on the basis of 37 research articles published in core journals from 2012 till 2022. In order to accurately cover the previous researches, we capitalize on three methods to evaluate and analyze the data, i.e., database search, citation search and manual search. Results show that from the perspective of the ESL/EFL learners’ gains, the OPF is basically divided into two categories (cognitive OPF and affective OPF), involving eight aspects in all: face-based strategies, revision-based comments, writing performance, learning environment, reflection/critical thinking/responsibility, writing emotion, motivation, and attitudes; and OPF can be well supported by a set of theories like Process-oriented Writing Theory, Collaborative Learning Theory, Interactionist Theory of L2 Acquisition and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. By comparison, the gains from OPF outperform those from offline PF in many dimensions (e.g., face-based strategies), despite some overlaps (e.g., the shift of the role) that were revealed in several investigations. Based on the past studies, we propose some pedagogical implications on OPF from ESL/EFL writing, including accenting the “student-centered” teaching strategy, providing students with OPF on the basis of incremental knowledge, adopting OPF regularly in ESL/EFL writing activities to shape personalities and outlooks and putting OPF into its full play with recourse to abundant internet-based vehicles. This review is desired to provide a guideline for both the peer feedback practice and the upcoming scholarly researches with respect to EFL/ESL writing.

The two event-related potentials (ERP) studies investigated how verbs and nouns were processed in different music priming conditions in order to reveal whether the motion concept via embodiment can be stimulated and evoked across categories. Study 1 (Tasks 1 and 2) tested the processing of verbs (action verbs vs. state verbs) primed by two music types, with tempo changes (accelerating music vs. decelerating music) and without tempo changes (fast music vs. slow music) while Study 2 (Tasks 3 and 4) tested the processing of nouns (animate nouns vs. inanimate nouns) in the same priming condition as adopted in Study 1. During the experiments, participants were required to hear a piece of music prior to judging whether an ensuing word (verb or noun) is semantically congruent with the motion concept conveyed by the music. The results show that in the priming condition of music with tempo changes, state verbs and inanimate nouns elicited larger N400 amplitudes than action verbs and animate nouns, respectively in the anterior regions and anterior to central regions, whereas in the priming condition of music without tempo changes, action verbs elicited larger N400 amplitudes than state verbs and the two categories of nouns revealed no N400 difference, unexpectedly. The interactions between music and words were significant only in Tasks 1, 2, and 3. Taken together, the results demonstrate that firstly, music with tempo changes and music without tempo prime verbs and nouns in different fashions; secondly, action verbs and animate nouns are easier to process than state verbs and inanimate nouns when primed by music with tempo changes due to the shared motion concept across categories; thirdly, bodily experience differentiates between music and words in coding (encoding and decoding) fashion but the motion concept conveyed by the two categories can be subtly extracted on the metaphorical basis, as indicated in the N400 component. Our studies reveal that music tempos can prime different word classes, favoring the notion that embodied motion concept exists across domains and adding evidence to the hypothesis that music and language share the neural mechanism of meaning processing.