Preface

Summary

This handbook is part of a three-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics that includes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the languages that have received significant research interest in psycholinguistics outside the Indo-European language family. The handbook project grew out of the discussions in a workshop that we organized in 2001 under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, at the University of California Santa Barbara, in conjunction with the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. Leading scholars in psycholinguistic studies of Chinese presented their research at the workshop, and they agreed that we need a handbook such as this one to synthesize the many lively debates on language acquisition, language processing, and language and the brain with particular reference to Chinese and other East Asian languages. The authors contributing to the handbook are mostly the presenters at the workshop, plus several others who could not attend the workshop. We are indebted to the organizers of the LSA Summer Institute, especially Charles Li, for making the workshop event possible. In addition to the conference grant provided by the NSF, the Office of the President at the University of Richmond also provided generous support for this project, for which we are grateful.

This volume represents a truly joint enterprise: we have more than thirty chapters from more than fifty authors, discussing important issues in psycholinguistics from all angles as they relate to the Chinese language.