This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left-right structured and top-bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades) were asked to produce invented characters with left-right and top-bottom stroke pattern pairs. Even kindergartners were aware of the positional constraints of stroke patterns and were able to produce orthographically legal pseudocharacters with different stroke pattern pairs. This ability improved across grade level. Moreover, there was a production asymmetry in which children produced more top-bottom structured pseudocharacters than left-right structured pseudocharacters. The error pattern analysis further revealed that more positional errors were observed in producing left-right structured noncharacters than in the top-bottom structured noncharacters. This production asymmetry seemed to reflect children's experience with a distribution asymmetry observed between left-right (59.19%) and top-bottom structured characters (23.46%) in a corpus of school Chinese. These results are discussed within the framework of statistical learning of orthographic regularity in Chinese.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2014.884098]

Understanding the value of monocultural acculturation orientation to the host culture (assimilation) and bicultural acculturation orientation (integration) for language learning is critical in guiding educational policy and practices for immigrant students. This study aimed to enhance our understanding on the relationship between acculturation orientation and second language (L2) learning. It generated two conceptual models to describe how cultural identification affects language learning as hypothesized in different theories on identity and L2 learning and tested these two hypothesized models in the immigration context of Hong Kong. A survey was conducted among a group of senior high school South Asian minority students on their learning of the language of the host culture, Chinese, to provide the basis for comparison. It was found that the students mainly adopted the bicultural/integration orientation and that bicultural orientation was the optimal acculturation orientation for learning Chinese. Bicultural orientation influenced the participants' Chinese language learning outcome through impacting psychosocial well-being and engagement with the target language and community. The findings suggest that we need to take both linguistic and psychosocial adjustment factors into consideration when conceptualizing the role of identity in L2 learning. Furthermore, this study cautions us against a context-independent stance toward the utility of assimilation for language learning.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.887054]