Zhiying Qian

Assistant Professor
Zhiying Qian

Contact Information

Office Location
Diffenbaugh 360
Email
zqian@fsu.edu
Program
Chinese
East Asian Languages and Cultures (MA)
Linguistics
Office Hours

4:30-5:30 pm Wednesday

Professor Qian (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures, with a certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, from UIUC in 2015. She specializes in psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and language program management. Prior to joining Florida State University, she held the position of Chinese Program Coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has studied Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Her research involves sentence processing by native speakers and second language learners of Chinese. She uses time-sensitive measures, such as EEG and eye-tracking, to investigate the moment-by-moment changes in the cognitive processes underlying language comprehension. Dr. Qian is currently working on three projects: 1) investigating classifier processing in Chinese, Japanese, and English, 2) exploring good-enough sentence processing by native speakers and second language learners, and 3) examining the effects of character-typing and homophone-training in the facilitation of second language acquisition of Chinese characters.

She is currently leading the Chinese Language Teachers Association’s Chinese as a Second Language Research Special Interest Group, where over 200 researchers gather remotely to engage in forum discussions, workshops, and other events related to both Chinese language teaching and research. The primary aim of this special interest group is to promote communication and inspire collaborative ideas. Anyone interested in joining this SIG is welcome to contact zqian@fsu.edu. She will serve as the Review Editor for the Journal of Chinese as a Second Language from 2024-2027.

To inquire about undergraduate and graduate research opportunities in the Language Processing and Eye-Tracking Lab, please email zqian@fsu.edu.

Research Interests

Applied Linguistics

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

Second Language Acquisition 

Sentence Processing

Courses Taught

Second Language Acquisition of East Asian Languages (graduate)

East Asian Language Pedagogy (graduate)

Second Language Sentence Processing (graduate)

Practical Issues in Chinese Language Pedagogy (graduate)

Introduction to East Asian Linguistics (undergraduate)

History of East Asian Languages (undergraduate)

Chinese Reading and Conversation (undergraduate)

Media Chinese (undergraduate)

Advanced Chinese I (undergraduate)

All levels of Chinese language courses (undergraduate)

RECENT GRANTS

  • The Seed Grant, FSU ($100,000; 2024-2026)
    • This project, in collaboration with Dr. Zilong Xie in the School of Communication Science and Discorders at FSU, investigates the neural tracking of hierarchical linguistic units during second language acquisition.
  • The Small Grant, FSU ($3,000; 2023)
  • The Committee on Faculty Research Support Grant, FSU ($20,000, 2022)
  • Jiede Empirical Research Grant, Chinese Language Teachers Association ($1,500; 2019-2020)
  • First-year Assistant Professor Grant, FSU ($20,000; 2019)

 

Selected Publications

  • Qian, Z. (under revision). A comparison of the concreteness of English and Mandarin classifier-noun combinations. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
  • Qian, Z. (forthcoming; 2024). Psycholinguistics of classifiers. In Schiller, N., & Kupisch, T. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Classifiers. Oxford University Press.
  • Qian, Z., & Dell, G. (2023). Parsing the late-closure ambiguity: While Schrödinger measured the cat escaped from the box. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. First View.
  • Qian, Z., & Li, Y. (2023). The development of Chinese language programs in the digital age: Character-teaching reform, blended learning, and teacher training, Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching, Special Issue, 18-30.
  • Qian, Z., & Lee, J.-T. (2023). Effect of training on syntactic adaptation in native and non-native sentence processing. Proceedings of the 42nd North American Conference of Chinese Linguistics.
  • Qian, Z. & Packard, J. (2022). Processing gapped and gapless relative clauses in Mandarin: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Languages, 7, 254.
  • Chen, J., & Qian, Z. (2022). Learning the lexical semantics of Mandarin monomorphemic state-change verbs by English-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese. Languages, 7, 215.
  • Qian, Z. (2022). The design of a web-based placement test for Chinese language programs at the college level. Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching, 13, 17-38.
  • Qian, Z. (2022). A framework for Chinese language programs at the college level: Design, challenges, and solutions. Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching, Special Issue, 60-72.
  • Qian, Z., Lee, E-K., Lu, H-Y., & Garnsey, S. (2019). Native and non-native (L1-Mandarin) speakers of English differ in online use of verb-based cues about sentence structure. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 897-911.
  • Qian, Z., Garnsey, S., & Christianson, K. (2018). A comparison of online and offline measures of good-enough processing in garden-path sentences. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33, 227-254.
  • Qian, Z., & Garnsey, S. (2016). A sheet of coffee: An event-related potential study on the processing of classifier-noun sequences in English and Mandarin. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 761-784.
  • Packard, J., & Qian, Z. (2016). A working memory explanation for recency effects in Mandarin second language sentence processing. Journal of Chinese Teaching in the World, 30, 75-100.
  • Qian, Z., & Garnsey, S. (2016). An ERP study of the processing of Mandarin classifiers. In Tao, Y-H. (Ed.) Integrating Chinese Linguistics Research and Language Learning and Teaching (pp. 59-80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Qian, Z., Lee, E-K., Lu, H-Y., & Garnsey, S. (2016). Verb bias and plausibility in second language sentence processing. In Scott, J., & Waughtal, D. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 40th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 304-317). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Qian, Z., Lee, E-K., Lu, H-Y., & Garnsey, S. (2016). The comprehension of English garden-path sentences by Mandarin and Korean learners of L2 English. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 608-613). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Qian, Z., & Garnsey, S. (2015). Why do readers answer questions incorrectly after reading garden-path sentences? Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1925-1930). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Qian, Z. (2015). The reanalysis and interpretation of garden-path sentences by native speakers and second language learners. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.