Here are some of the projects taking place or recently completed within the XinLab.
Title: Beyond Segments: towards a lexical model for tonal bilinguals
Principle Investigators: Xin Wang, Bob McMurray
Funding: Australia Research Council: Discovery Program
Project description: This project aims to understand how healthy adult bilinguals resolve competition from their unintended language to communicate successfully in the intended language, using eye-tracking techniques. In both bilingual language comprehension and production, the project will characterise the role of an under-explored linguistic dimension, lexical tone, in cross-language processing.
Papers:
Title: Neural mechanisms of cross-langauge tone processing: evidence from MEG studies
Principle Investigators: Xindong Zhang, Xin Wang, Judy. D. Zhu, Junjie Wu, Paul. F. Sowman
Funding: CSC-MQ scholarship
Project description: Pitch variation in tonal languages (i.e., lexical tone) like Mandarin Chinese play a crucial role in constraining spoken word recognition. In contrast, pitch variation in non-tonal languages like English typically serve prosodic rather than lexical functions, signaling aspects such as speaker emotion or sentence modality (e.g., declarative vs. interrogative), without changing the meaning of individual words. Building on this cross-linguistic distinction, the present project investigates how pitch variations are processed across tonal and non-tonal language systems at the neural level, using magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Papers:
Title: The online effects of processing instruction on second language acquisition and the role of input modality: Primary and secondary effects
Principle Investigators: Amin Pouresmaeil, Xin Wang, Alessandro Benati
Funding: Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship
Project description: This project investigates how second language (L2) learners process L2 in real time after receiving one hour of computer-based instruction in the form of processing instruction (PI) or structured input (SI). The study also aims to find out whether instruction provided on a particular linguistic structure (English passives in this case) would have any transfer-of-training effects on processing other linguistic structures (English passive causatives in this case). The study employs two online tests, namely a self-paced reading test and a self-paced listening test, to measure accuracy of response, response time in selecting the correct picture, and reading/listening time. Through employing online tests in two modalities (written and auditory), the study also aims to explore how input modality may affect the learners’ processing of language.
Papers published:
Works submitted for review: