Zhiying Qian
Contact Information
4:30-5:30 p.m. Wednesday
About
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 Chinese language program administration. Before joining Florida State University, she served as Chinese Program Coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also studied Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. At FSU, she is the graduate advisor for Chinese-track students in the East Asian Languages and Cultures program.
Her research investigates sentence processing in both native speakers and second language learners. Using time-sensitive measures such as EEG and eye-tracking, she examines the moment-by-moment cognitive processes underlying language comprehension. She pursues two closely related lines of research: (1) sentence processing in psycholinguistics, with a focus on predictive processing, good-enough processing, classifier processing, and second language sentence processing; and (2) second language acquisition of Chinese, particularly the facilitative effect of digital typing on learners’ acquisition of Chinese characters and AI-enhanced Chinese language teaching, aiming to develop more effective pedagogical approaches to teaching Chinese as a second language.
Dr. Qian is actively involved in professional organizations. She is a board member of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA-US) (2025–2028), serving on the Awards Committee and the Professional Development Committee, and leads the CLTA Chinese as a Second Language Research Special Interest Group (SIG), which connects over 250 researchers worldwide through online discussions, workshops, talks, and other events. She is also the Review Editor for the Journal of Chinese as a Second Language (2024–2027); those interested in contributing a book review are welcome to contact her at zqian@fsu.edu. In addition, she serves on the board of the Association of E-Writing-Based Pedagogical Advancement in Chinese Education and the editorial board of the International Journal of Chinese Language Teaching.
For undergraduate and graduate research opportunities in the Language Processing and Eye-Tracking Lab, students are encouraged to contact zqian@fsu.edu.
Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics
Second Language Acquisition of Chinese
Sentence Processing
Chinese Program Development and AI-Enhanced Language Teaching
Cai, P., & Qian, Z. (under review). The effect of color enhancement on L2 Chinese vocabulary
acquisition and text comprehension.
Hang, Z., & Qian, Z. (under review). Unpacking the congruency effect in L2 idiom processing:
Triangulating reaction times and multilingual think-alouds.
Qian, Z. (in press, 2025). The psycholinguistics of classifiers. In Schiller, N., & Kupisch, T. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Classifiers. Oxford University Press.
Qian, Z. (2025). Cloze test and self-assessment as measures of L2 Chinese proficiency: A
contextualized approach for university language programs. International Journal of
Chinese Linguistics.
Qian, Z. (2025). Evaluating the effectiveness of e-writing: Experimental evidence, enrollment
trends, and learner experiences. Journal of Research on International Chinese Teaching
and Learning Resources, 2, 110-138.
Qian, Z. (2025). What you ask affects what you get: Task-dependent ERPs in the processing of
syntactically ambiguous sentences. In Barner, D., Bramley, N., Ruggeri, A., & Walker, C.
(Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp.
1514-1520). University of California Merced.
Qian, Z., & Dell, G. (2024). Parsing the late-closure ambiguity: While Schrödinger measured the cat escaped from the box. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31, 401-409.
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.
Graduate
• Second Language Acquisition of East Asian Languages
• East Asian Language Pedagogy
• Second Language Sentence Processing
• Practical Issues in Chinese Language Pedagogy
Undergraduate
• Chinese Civilization
• Introduction to East Asian Linguistics
• Introduction to Chinese Linguistics
• History of East Asian Languages
• Practical Writing in Chinese
• Media Chinese
• Chinese Reading and Conversation
• Advanced Chinese I
• All levels of Chinese language courses
• The Seed Grant, FSU ($100,000; 2024-2026)
o This project, in collaboration with Dr. Zilong Xie in the School of Communication Science and Disorders 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 Award, FSU ($20,000, 2019)