Zhen Qin receives support from Doctoral Student Research Fund

Doctoral student Zhen Qin (Quentin) received $2,000 from KU's Office of Graduate Studies in support of his dissertation research. In his dissertation, Quentin aims to examine how native speakers and advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Chinese use tonal information in the recognition of Chinese words as the speech signal unfolds. Specifically, two visual-world eye-tracking experiments in Chinese will be conducted to test whether or not native and non-native listeners make similar use of early pitch height as well as fine-grained within-category pitch information in the recognition of words that differ in lexical tones. Answering these questions will help elucidate how tonal information can be incorporated into models of native and L2 word recognition, and it will have important implications for the teaching of lexical tones in the classroom.