• Skip to Content
  • Skip to Main Navigation
  • Skip to Search

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington IU Bloomington

Open Search
  • People
    • Core Faculty
    • Affiliate Faculty
    • Emeriti Faculty
    • Staff
    • Graduate Students
    • Administration
    • Academic Visitors
  • Languages
    • Chinese program
      • Overseas Study in Taiwan
      • Courses
      • Faculty
      • Placement & proficiency exams
      • Resources
    • Japanese program
      • Courses
      • Faculty
      • Placement & proficiency exams
      • Student organizations & activities
      • Resources
    • Korean program
      • Courses
      • Faculty
      • Foreign Language Requirement
      • Program history
      • Resources
    • Special credit
  • Graduate
    • Admissions
      • Domestic Applicants
        • Domestic Applicant FAQs
      • International Applicants
        • International Applicant FAQs
    • MA programs
    • PhD programs
    • PhD minor
    • Reading proficiency
    • Funding opportunities
    • Resources
    • Overseas Study
  • Undergraduate
    • Special opportunities
    • Academic advising
    • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Resources
  • Diversity
    • DEI Statement
  • Courses
  • Give Now
  • Contact Us

Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies

East Asian Languages and Cultures

  • Home
  • People
    • Core Faculty
    • Affiliate Faculty
    • Emeriti Faculty
    • Staff
    • Graduate Students
    • Administration
    • Academic Visitors
  • Languages
    • Chinese program
    • Japanese program
    • Korean program
    • Special credit
  • Graduate
    • Admissions
    • MA programs
    • PhD programs
    • PhD minor
    • Reading proficiency
    • Funding opportunities
    • Resources
    • Overseas Study
  • Undergraduate
    • Special opportunities
    • Academic advising
    • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Resources
  • Diversity
    • DEI Statement
  • Search
  • Courses
  • Give Now
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • People
  • Chien-Jer Charles Lin
false

Chien-Jer Charles Lin

James and Noriko Gines Department Chair, Professor

Phone:
(812) 855-5180
Email:
chiclin@iu.edu
Office:
Global and International Studies Building, 2031

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

  • Language and Cognition Laboratory
  • Personal Website

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.
  • Core Faculty
  • Affiliate Faculty
  • Emeriti Faculty
  • Staff
  • Graduate Students
  • Administration
  • Academic Visitors

East Asian Languages and Cultures resources and social media channels

  • Intranet
  • Contact Us
  • Twitter

Contact, Address and Additional Links

Explore

  • Admissions
  • Departments, Centers & Institutes
  • Faculty
  • Foreign Language Studies
  • Graduate Programs
  • Undergraduate Programs
  • Contact

For Students

  • Academic Advising
  • Career Development
  • Classes
  • FLAS Fellowships
  • Scholarships
  • Study Abroad
  • Student Clubs
  • Student Resources

For Faculty/Staff

  • Communications Support
  • Digital Slides
  • Faculty & Staff Intranet
  • Request Forms

Connect

  • News & Events
  • Give Now

HAMILTON LUGAR SCHOOLBLOOMINGTON

355 North Eagleson Avenue
Bloomington, IN
47405-1105
Email: hls@iu.edu
Phone: (812) 856-7900

Indiana University

Accessibility | College Scorecard | Open to All | Privacy Notice | Copyright © 2025 The Trustees of Indiana University