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Chien-Jer Charles Lin

Chien-Jer Charles Lin

Associate Professor

Phone:: (812) 855-5180
Email:: chiclin@indiana.edu
Office:: Global and International Studies Building, 2006

Charles Lin is associate professor of Chinese linguistics at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and adjunct associate professor at the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Program. He directs the Language and Cognition Lab, working primarily on the interface between grammar, discourse, and cognition. His lab is equipped to conduct behavioral (response time experiments & eye-tracking) and neurolinguistic experiments (electroencephalogram or EEG). His main research interests include processing dependencies in head-final structures (in particular, the comprehension and production of Chinese relative clauses), processing discourse relations (e.g., causals, concessives, counterfactuals, and negation), processing issues in syntactic theorization and grammaticality judgments, thematic role orders, mass/count distinctions and quantity conceptualization in a classifier language, the representation and processing of lexical ambiguity, the perception and acquisition of Chinese vowels in relation to phonetic orthography, processing tone sandhi in Chinese words, phrases and sentences, and the development of speech representations in the second language lexicon. He welcomes students interested in language processing to join his research team.

Websites

Research Interests

Chinese linguistics
Sentence and discourse processing
East Asian psycholinguistics
Experimental linguistics, corpus linguistics
Linguistic anthropology

Education

PhD, University of Arizona, 2006

Courses Recently Taught

Linguistic Diversity in East and Southeast Asia (EALC E204)
Chinese Language and Culture (EALC E301/505)
Psychology of Chinese (EALC E350/505)
East Asian Language and Cognition (EALC E350)
Introduction to Chinese Linguistics (EALC C421/520)
Chinese Syntax & Semantics (EALC C505)
Linguistic and Processing Issues in Translation (EALC C600)
Seminar on Chinese Language, Culture, and Cognition (EALC C600)
Seminar on Sentence Processing (EALC E600)
Linguistic Communication and Thinking in a Global Context (IU’s Intensive Freshman Seminar)

Awards and Distinctions

Trustees’ Teaching Award, Indiana University, May 2016
Young Scholar Award on Interdisciplinary Research from the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL), May 2010
International Young Scholar Award, PACLIC-19, 2005
Dissertation Scholarship, Ministry of Education, TAIWAN, 2005-2006
Fulbright Scholarship, 2001-2003
Chao Yuan-Ren Foundation Scholarship, 2001

Publication Highlights

Journal Articles

Lyu, Siqi, Tu, Jung-Yueh, and Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2020). Processing plausibility in concessive and causal relations: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking. Discourse Processes 57, 320-342. DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2019.1680089
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2018). Subject prominence and processing filler-gap dependencies in prenominal relative clauses: The comprehension of possessive relative clauses and adjunct relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Language 94, 758-797.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Chen, Yi-Rung. (2015). Exhaustive semantic activation for reading ambiguous verbs in Chinese sentences. Lingua Sinica. 1:7.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2015). Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology. 6:1255.
Chang, Yuchun, Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Ahrens, Kathleen. (2015). Conventionalization of lexical meanings and the role of metaphoricity: Processing of metaphorical polysemy using a cross-modal lexical priming task. Language and Linguistics 16, 587-614.
Jaeger, Lena, Chen, Zhong, Li, Qiang, Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Vasishth, Shravan. (2015). The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing. Journal of Memory and Language 79-80, 97-120. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005)
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2014). Effect of thematic order on the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. Lingua 140, 180-206. (doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.003)
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Ahrens, Kathleen. (2010). Ambiguity advantage revisited: Two meanings are better than one when accessing Chinese Nouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 39, 1-19.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2008). The processing foundation of head-final relative clauses. Language and Linguistics 9, 813-38.

Book Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Edited Volumes

Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, and Hai Hu. (in press). Linking comprehension and production: Frequency distribution of Chinese relative clauses in the Sinica Treebank. In Chu-Ren Huang, Shukai Hsieh, & Peng Jin (eds.) Chinese Language Resources: Data Collection, Linguistic Analysis, Annotation and Language Processing. Springer.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2021). Psycholinguistics. In James Stanlaw (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Wiley.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2019). Chinese psycholinguistics: A typological overview. In Chu-Ren Huang, Barbara Meisterernst, & Zhuo Jing-Schmidt (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics (pp. 773-785). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge/Francis & Taylor.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2019). The psycholinguistics of Chinese discourse processing. In Chris Shei (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis (pp. 265-279). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2016). Sentence processing: Relative clauses. In C.-T. James Huang, James Myers, & Rint Sybesma (eds.) Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Brill.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2013). Thematic templates and the comprehension of relative clauses. In Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, & Michael K. Tanenhaus (eds.) Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis of Linguistic Structures (pp. 141-148). Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2012). Distinguishing grammatical and processing explanations of syntactic acceptability. In James Myers (ed.) In Search of Grammar: Experimental and Corpus-Based Studies (pp.119-137). Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 48. Academia Sinica, Taipei.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (2011). Processing (in)alienable possessions at the syntax-semantics interface. In Raffaella Folli, & Christiane Ulbrich (eds.) Interfaces in Linguistics: New Research Perspectives (pp.351-367). New York: Oxford University Press.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles & Bever, Thomas G. (2011). Garden path in the processing of head-final relative clauses. In Hiroko Yamashita, Jerry Packard, & Yuki Hirose (eds.) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures (pp. 277-297). New York, NY: Springer.
Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, & Ahrens, Kathleen. (2005). How many meanings does a word have? Meaning estimation in Chinese and English. In James W. Minett & William S-Y. Wang (eds.) Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary Linguistics (pp. 437-464). Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press.

Research Grants

Indiana University – Renmin University Strategic Seed Fund (2019-2021). Project title: Constructing a multi-genre treebank of translated and non-translated Chinese. (Co-PIs: Sandra Kuebler, Xinyue Yao, & linguistics graduate student, Hai Hu)
Faculty Research Support Program, Indiana University (2018-2020). Project title: The second language mental lexicon: nature and scope of first language interference. (Co-PI: Isabelle Darcy)
Research Grant for International Research Planning and Initiation, School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University (2018-2019). Project title: Syntactic effects on the production of sandhi tones: A corpus study of Taiwan Mandarin.
Research Grant for International Research Planning and Initiation, School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University (2017-2018). Project title: A Corpus Study of Syntactic Complexity in Translational Chinese.
Indiana University Research Equipment Fund (2017-2018). Project title: Relative Clause Processing in Typologically Distinctive Languages.
Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation International Scholarly Exchange Grant (2017-2018). Project title: Hearing phonetic notations: How pinyin/zhuyin influences the perception of Mandarin syllables.
Collaborative Research and Creative Activity Funding (CRCAF), Indiana University. Project title: The electroencephalography of phonetic notation effects on Chinese syllable processing.
Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland (2015). Project title: Linguistic correlates of Chinese language proficiency.
Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching and Collaboration Short Term Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University (2014). Project title: The influence of non-alphabetic orthography on Mandarin speech perception.
Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Junior Scholar Grant (2013). Project title: Restrictiveness and Chinese relative clauses: Perspectives from sentence processing.
Faculty Research Support Program, Indiana University (2011-2013). Project title: Floating thematic templates and Chinese sentence comprehension.