Previous neuroimaging studies in adults have revealed that first and second languages (L1/L2) share similar neural substrates, and that proficiency is a major determinant of the neural organization of L2 in the lexical-semantic and syntactic domains. However, little is known about neural substrates of children in the phonological domain, or about sex differences. Here, we conducted a large-scal...

The ability to quantify differences in walking balance proficiency is critical to curbing the rising health and financial costs of falls. Current laboratory-based approaches typically focus on successful recovery of balance while clinical instruments often pose little difficulty for all but the most impaired patients. Rarely do they test motor behaviors of sufficient difficulty to evoke failure...

By administering Simon, Simon switching, and operation-span working memory tasks to Cantonese-English bilingual children who varied in their first-language (L1, Cantonese) and second-language (L2, English) proficiencies, as quantified by standardized vocabulary test performance, the current study examined the effects of L1 and L2 proficiency on attentional control performance. Apart from mean p...

This paper presents work on how we can link word lists derived from learner corpora to target proficiency levels for lexical complexity analysis. The word lists present frequency distributions over different proficiency levels. We present a mapping approach which takes these distributions and maps each word to a single proficiency level. We are also investigating how we can evaluate the mapping...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the second language (L2) learners’ linguistic backgrounds and L2 proficiency have an effect on their perception of L2 sounds. This paper attempts to investigate the assimilation patterns of Mandarin and Tibetan tones, and the influences of first language (L1) backgrounds and Mandarin proficiency on the perception of Mandarin tones. A total of 46 Tibetan p...

Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

OBJECTIVES To examine patterns of disease and injury in people living on boats in Hue City, Vietnam, and their relations to socioeconomic conditions, sanitary practices, disease prevention proficiency, and people's preference to continued living on boats. METHODS The subjects were 3737 people aged 5 years and over living on boats in Hue City, Vietnam. Diseases and injuries were diagnosed acco...