J Psycholinguist Res (2015) 44:215–217 DOI 10.1007/s10936-015-9373-3

Editorial: New Frontiers in East Asian Psycholinguistics Michael C. W. Yip1

Published online: 10 May 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Special Issue: The Psycholinguistics of East Asian languages Research on the psycholinguistics issues in East Asian languages has grown tremendously in the past 30 years. With the new methodologies and the development of advanced technology during the past three decades, a lot of new research findings to the psycholinguistics of East Asian languages have been reported along with the development of some innovative approaches of research in this area.

Introduction Much of the traditional theories or knowledge in psycholinguistics has come from studies of Indo-European languages, particularly the English language. Due to the universal principles of language, some researchers in this area therefore believe that theories of language acquisition, language comprehension and language processing should operate in the same way across all languages though some of those theories are based on empirical facts that obtained from some specific languages (such as non-Indo-European languages). This language universality view, proposed by Noam Chomsky’s theories of language (1969), has dominated in this area over the last five decades. However, other researchers (particularly in the research area of bilingual/multi-lingual studies) believe that language-specific properties, variations and languages interaction should be sufficiently strong to re-conceptualize the traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic theories because of the newly observed research findings on cognitive and neural underpinnings from different languages (see Grosjean and Li 2013; Hernandez 2013). The debate between these two perspectives has initiated more and more psycholinguistic studies of non-Indo-European languages, in particular the East Asian languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese and Korean) during the past three decades.

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Michael C. W. Yip [email protected] Department of Psychological Studies, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR

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The specific properties of East Asian languages (such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean) are different significantly from English and most other Indo-European languages in some aspects: for example, (a) Role of orthography and phonology in word recognition and lexical processing, (b) Role of word structure on lexical access and sentence processing, (c) Interaction of lexicon, grammar, and context in language acquisition and language processing, and (d) Neurological mechanisms of language acquisition, comprehension and processing. Clearly, these languages provide many unique and interesting psycholinguistic properties in its orthographic, phonological, and syntactic structures to crucial examination of those traditional psycholinguistic issues. In 2006 and 2009, Professor Ping Li and his colleagues produced a set of three-volume fascinating Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Lee et al. 2009; Li et al. 2006; Nakayama et al. 2006). This three-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics presented a state-of-theart discussion of the psycholinguistic issues of the three East Asian languages (i.e. Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It covered a wide variety of topics including first and second language acquisition, language processing and reading, language disorders in children and adults, and the relationships between language, brain, culture, and cognition. This special issue aims to continue the spirit to publish a collection of interesting research papers that reflect the recent development in East Asian Psycholinguistics.

Highlights of the Articles Three empirical research papers with exciting new data are presented to examine the current studies of Chinese psycholinguistics in the first part. In the first paper, Li, Lin, Chou, Yang and Wu investigated the role of orthographic neighborhood in Chinese word recognition by two behavioral experiments (lexical decision task and naming task). They observed that it was generally easier and faster to recognize Chinese words with a larger neighborhood size (NS) than those with a smaller NS. Moreover, when comparing the effect sizes of word frequency between the two experimental tasks, it revealed a larger word frequency effect on the lexical decision task, which indicated the sub-word processing was involved in the multi-character word recognition. In the second paper, Lee and Zhang investigated the effect of speaker variability on accessing the form and the meaning of spoken words by two priming experiments. Their findings revealed a clear but weak speaker variability effect on the access to the word form and the meaning of spoken words. In the third paper, Hsieh and Boland used two eye-tracking experiments to re-examine the issue of lexical ambiguity resolution and aimed to unfold the time-course of the disambiguation process. They observed that the degree of semantic support could predict the processing difficulty of the Chinese readers during the disambiguation process, which supported the parallel constraint-based parsing mechanism. Concerning the psycholinguistics studies of Japanese, two interesting research papers are reported in the second part. Based on the previous conflicting results found in cleft construction between the western languages (e.g. English and French) and Japanese, Yano, Tateyama and Sakamoto further investigated the same issue in Japanese cleft constructions by an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment with a control for confound (transitional probabilities). They observed that the subject gap preference in Japanese was in general consistent with the results obtained from the western languages, which arguing the universality of subject gap preference in language comprehension. In the second paper, Minai, Isobe and Okabe investigated the comprehension of scrambled Japanese sentences by preschool chil-

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dren. Their results revealed that children could use prosodic information to interpret those scrambled sentences and as the same way as adults do. The final part includes three research papers on the psycholinguistics studies of Korean. In the first paper, Lee, Kwon, Kim, and Rastle investigated on the impact of letter transpositions in visual word recognition of Korean. Their findings strongly supported that “syllable” was an important functional processing unit in visual word recognition of Korean and also suggested the position invariance in syllable representations of Korean. In the second paper, Lee, Kwon, and Gordon used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases in reading complex Korean sentences. Their results revealed that the animacy manipulation and the nominative-topicality manipulation would clearly affect participants’ reading of the complex Korean sentences. Furthermore, results showed the effect of the prominence misalignment elicited by animacy manipulation even stronger than the effect elicited by the nominative-topicality manipulation. The final paper by Pae and Lee studied on the topic of lexical processing of L2 involving both native Chinese speakers and native Korean speakers. They employed a lexical decision task to examine lexical processing in English by the two groups of speakers. They observed that native Chinese speakers were more sensitive to the distortions of the visual form than the native Korean speakers. The findings argued that linguistic knowledge of L1, such as linguistic template, had an important role in word processing in L2 (i.e. English).

Conclusion We know that it is impossible to report all exciting research in this area in one single special issue but we believe that this special issue can provide the up-to-dated research findings on some of the important psycholinguistic issues of the three East Asian languages. Contributions to this issue include experimental studies based on a wide variety of conceptual foundations, different theoretical perspectives, and methodologies (from behavioral methods, eye-tracking approaches to neuroimaging techniques). We sincerely hope that this special issue serves as a catalyst for new research in this area and finally we thank all authors for their excellent contributions to this special issue.

References Chomsky, N. (1969). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grosjean, F., & Li, P. (2013). The psycholinguistics of bilingualism. New York, NY: Wiley. Hernandez, A. E. (2013). The bilingual brain. USA: Oxford University Press. Lee, C., Simpson, G., Kim, Y., & Li, P. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Vol. 3: Korean). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Li, P., Tan, L. H., Bates, E., & Tzeng, O. J. L. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Vol. 1: Chinese). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nakayama, M., Mazuka, R., Shirai, Y., & Li, P. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Vol. 2: Japanese). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Editorial: New Frontiers in East Asian Psycholinguistics.

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