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Our lab has been presenting our research world-wide this summer (2025):
Xiao Dong presented research on "Perceiving Neutral Tone: Divergent Social Evaluations by Beijing and Taiwan Listeners" in NWAV Asia Pacific 8 in Singapore (co-authored with Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, and Charles Lin) -- This study investigates how neutral tone (NT) in Mandarin is perceived socially in Beijing and Taiwan. Using a matched-guise survey with recordings varying in NT, region, and gender, 96 listeners rated talkers on seven social traits, revealing that perceptions of NT differed by listener region, talker accent, and gender. Findings show that NT interacts with social stereotypes and regional identity, influencing judgments of femininity, cuteness, gentleness, intelligence, likability, and accentedness in complex, region-specific ways.
Xiao Dong then went to Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) to present on "Neutral Tone Variation in Beijing Mandarin: Is Neutral Tone Toneless?" (co-authored with Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, Shuju Shi, and me--Charles Lin).
Prof. Lin has toured around Taiwan in National Taiwna University, National Chung-Cheng University, and National Tsing-Hua University, and will be giving a talk in AMLaP 2025 in Prague (Czek Republic) on "Building Structures Left to Right and Bottom Up: The Production and Perception of Syntactic Branching by L1 and L2 Users of a Tone Language", which shares the lab's research on how to process structural ambiguity considering both left-to-right and bottom-up ways of processing.
Prof. Lin received a grant from IU's inaugural "Layered-Learning Program for Undergraduate (UG) Researchers" to educate undergradaute students to learn about experimental linguistics in his lab in 2025-2026 (APril 22, 2025). We welcome students from all backgrounds who have a genuine curiosity about how language works in the mind and society. => update: The selection process has been completed and we will be welcoming 4 undergraduate students into the lab.
Undergraduate research assistants (RAs) will be mentored by graduate students in a supportive lab environment. RAs will gain hands-on experience in reading and presenting research articles, designing and running linguistic experiments, coding and analyzing data, and contributing to research presentations and discussions in a lab setting. Over the course of the program, RAs will rotate through three research topics, eventually focusing in depth on one:
Cognitive and linguistic changes in typical and atypical aging
The role of prosody in resolving ambiguity (e.g., Is the hat or the unicorn purple in “the purple unicorn hat”?)
How speakers and learners of Mandarin are perceived—and perceive themselves—as speaking with an accent
Our lab has the following new presentations:
Xiao Dong recently presented on the use of neutral tones in Taiwan versus Beijing Mandarin in NWAV in Miami.
Zeping Liu is presenting on our work on Large Language Model in making predictions on suprisal in sentence processig in Psychonomic Society's Annual Conference in New York.
Xiao Dong will be presenting on our new work on processing ambiguous third tone sequences by L1 and L2 Mandarin users in LSA's annual meeting in January of 2025.
Prof. Charles Lin was appointed the James and Noriko Gines Department Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures starting in the the summer of 2024.
The following publications just came out:
Liu, Fengming & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2024). Relative clause attachments in Mandarin Chinese: Insights from classifier-noun agreement. Frontiers in Language Sciences: Psycholinguistics. doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1438323
Gao, Feier, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (2024). Incorporating frequency effects in the lexical access for Mandarin tone 3 sandhi. Language and Speech. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309241260062
Alessia Cherici, Bihua Chen, & Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (eds.) (2023). Proceedings of the 34th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, Bloomington. (https://sites.google.com/view/naccl-34/proceedings)
Professor Yea-Fen Chen from Department of EALC, who is the director of IU's Chinese Flagship Program and specializes in Chinese Language Pedagogy, has received the distinctive honor of 2024’s CLTA Outstanding Contribution Award (突出贡献奖). This is such fantastic news! We are so proud to have her be a leader of Chinese language teaching here in Indiana University!
A new book chapter on the distribution of relative clauses in the Sinica Chinese treebank (Lin & Hu, 2023) has just been published!
International Workshop of Chinese Characters and Reading (National Chung-Cheng University)
International Workshop of Chinese Characters and Reading (National Chung-Cheng University)
Signing MOU between LaCL and CCU
Signing MOU between LaCL and CCU
In the summer of 2023, I gave a keynote speech on "Attaching Relative Clauses High or Low" in the International Workshop of Chinese Characters and Reading. At the end of the workshop, I signed an MOU with Prof. James Tai, representing National Chung-Cheng University in Taiwan to promote research exchanges between the Language and Cognition Lab and CCU's research on language, literacy, and aging.
Thanks to a collaborative grant between Indiana University and National Taiwan University, we invited three speakers from National Taiwan University and hosted a Symposium on Language, Brain, and Society in October of 2023. The two institutions have ongoing exchange programs and we foresee close collaborations with our visitors in the future.
IU-NTU Symposium on Language, Brain, and Society was a one-day symposium that delves into the intricate world of language, the most profound symbolic system through which humans communicate, bridging the realms of individual cognition and communal interaction. Explore the fascinating facets of language, as we embark on a journey that peers into the inner workings of the human mind and brain, while simultaneously observing its role in shaping social networks. The IU-NTU Symposium brings together scholars from Indiana University, Bloomington, and National Taiwan University to deliver cutting-edge research presentations and stimulating discussions on the various dimensions of language. Discover how language manifests within the brain, the intricacies of its acquisition, and the captivating processes of variation and change in society. These transformations ripple through perception and production, ultimately shaping the social fabric and identities within our society.
Articles Under Review
1. Dong, Xiao, Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (under review). Place orientation and language practice: An update on neutral tone among Beijing professionals. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 30.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 51.
2. Hu, Hai, Aini Li, Yina Patterson, Jiahui Huang, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (under review). Bilingual influences and sources of variability in acceptability judgments: A case study of Chinese.
3. Liu, Zeping, & Chien-Jer Charles Lin. (under review). The role of prediction error in syntactic adaptation: Evidence from structural disambiguation in Chinese.
The Whale (by Lyla Lin, 2017)
Mind (by Lyla Lin, 2017)
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