This chapter focuses on literacy development in East Asia, the eastern region of the Asian continent. Students in most East Asian countries perform well in literacy. However, migrant communities still face struggles, leading to fewer opportunities in the labor market. East Asia has a very long history of literary practice. With China being the largest and oldest country in East Asia, its writing system has a profound impact in the region. The modern Chinese writing system is used not only by the 1.4 billion people in Mainland China but also in Chinese-speaking regions such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It is further used by Chinese-heritage speakers in Singapore, Malaysia, and countries around the world. However, most East Asian countries are biscriptal. This chapter starts out with an overview of the writing systems used in China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, followed by a description of the educational system in relation to literacy in each country. In the remaining part of the chapter the focus is on individual variation, neurological foundations and environmental factors related to literacy development in Chinese. Finally, the chapter presents a comparison of the factors related to literacy development in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

This chapter introduces the term Chinese and the differences between Mandarin and Chinese dialects. There are seven major dialects: Northern dialect, Cantonese, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Min, and Hakka in China. The variation between these dialects causes comprehension problems in oral communication, and as such, Mandarin (Chinese in this book), which is based on the Northern dialect as a national standard language, has become popular in present-day China.

This chapter surveys the corpus of early Buddhist texts that have survived the passage of time and can be consulted by scholars. These comprise the complete canon of the Theravāda school written in Pali, a significant amount of the canon in Sanskrit belonging to the Sarvāstivāda school, plus more in Chinese translation, and substantial portions of the canons of other schools, also preserved in Chinese. Determining whether particular texts were early or later, along with analysis of their mode of transmission, enables them to be evaluated as sources for comparative analysis. This rather technical chapter concludes with a discussion of difficulties encountered in drawing parallels between texts from different schools in different languages.

This chapter investigates whether Taiwanese university students find EL in health information difficult. On average, approximately 90% of them did not have difficulty understanding EL while about 10% of them did. The rates of difficulty appear to increase with the severity of the health condition. Furthermore, the higher the number of different elastic terms intensively used in the excerpt, the more difficulty the participants experience in understanding EL. Based on interviews with approximately 20 participants, we address what may cause the difficulty and identify six reasons (e.g., unfulfilled expectation of specific information, semantic fuzziness combined with insufficient health literacy, unclear instructions that do not match the needs of the patient and family, increased vagueness caused by the intensive use of EL). In order to understand participants’ attitudes towards EL and non-EL, we analysed the participants’ written feedback as to why they preferred EL or non-EL in the health context. Six frames were identified, each with two orientations. Four of the most frequently activated frames are communication, folk–idiosyncratic, trust–scepticism, and voluntary–involuntary action. Two social factors (i.e., gender and age) in relation to Taiwanese participants’ perceptions of and attitudes towards EL are also addressed.

In this chapter, we address the issues related to sentence grammaticality and acceptability. We begin with a discussion of the relationship between the two notions, and point out that despite the differences in theoretical conceptualization, the two notions, grammaticality and acceptability, are often confluent and that grammaticality is usually measured as acceptability in linguistic research. We then discuss factors beyond syntax that may influence sentence acceptability, including processing factors and semantic/pragmatic considerations. Finally, we discuss the measurement of acceptability, via either experimental methods or corpus-based analyses. To conclude, we show in this chapter how grammaticality, a seemingly purely syntactic notion, is often materialized as acceptability, which encompasses multiple linguistic modules that go beyond syntax.

The primary function of language is to convey what we mean for communication. Semantics, a subfield of linguistics, aims to understand how meanings are encoded and operate in different levels of linguistic forms (such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and discourses). The cumulative evidence thus far has mainly been based on native speaker intuitions about the meanings of linguistic forms in language usage. With recent breakthroughs in neuroimaging techniques, neurolinguistic research has been used to test and evaluate theories put forth by theoretical linguistics by measuring the brain activity underlying language processes. This chapter reviews a series of neurolinguistics studies that took N400, an event–related potentials (ERPs) component to index the semantic processing, to investigate how the brain processes meaning conveyed by Chinese radicals, characters, classifiers, and the leading context of sentences. These findings make essential contributions to the growing understanding of when and how meanings are extracted, represented, and processed in the brain for language comprehension.

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

The debate on modern Chinese being SVO or SOV is facing a dilemma: the word order is SVO in an unmarked declarative sentence in Chinese, while Chinese exhibits many features shared by SOV languages. To tackle this difficult situation, researchers should focus on language types, but not the relative orders of subject, verb, and object. Based on the usage of modern Chinese, we have checked ten universals generalized in Greenberg (1963) which are relevant to this topic. It is shown that 90% of the universals support Chinese being a SOV language, and only one universal is on the SVO side. Modern Chinese is therefore argued to be located very close to the SOV end of a continuum.