Neurocomputational Approaches to Chinese

The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the fruitful directions that language scientists can pursue with the study of language-specific properties of Chinese by using computational models and neuroimaging methods. The chapter discusses language acquisition and lexical representation in both the monolingual and the bilingual context and examines both children and adults who learn Chinese as a native language and English as a second language. It summarizes recent work from our research focused on language processing, language acquisition, and language and brain based on a variety of behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methodologies. The chapter concludes by pointing toward important avenues of research, specifically research directions that Chinese language scientists should consider exploring in future studies with cross-disciplinary approaches toward linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience.