Presentations and Talks

Refereed conference presentations

1. Shi, J., & Zhou, P. (2022). Lexical cues facilitate Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds’ comprehension of relative clauses. Poster presented at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of California, Santa Cruz.

2. Zhou, P., Ma, W., & Zhan, L. (2022). Children with autism spectrum disorder fail to generalize emotional prosody. Poster presented at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of California, Santa Cruz.

3. Shi, J., & Zhou, P. (2021). Turning the young parser into the adult parser: Working memory matters. Paper presented at the 34th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

4. Li, J., & Zhou, P. (2021). Mandarin-speaking children’s use of prosodic information in resolving ambiguous topic structures. Paper to be presented at the 9th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America Conference (GALANA-9), University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland. 

5. Zhang, X., & Zhou, P. (2021). Acquisition of non-factive mental verbs facilitates false-belief understanding in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Paper to be presented at the 15th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2020), Philadelphia, USA. 

6. Zhou. P., Ma, W., & Zhan, L. (2020). Do children with autism spectrum disorder use prosodic cues to infer others’ mental states? Paper presented at the 33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.

7. Zhang, X., & Zhou, P. (2020). Linguistic cues facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Paper presented at the 33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. 

8. Zhang, X., & Zhou, P. (2020). Acquisition of non-factive mental verbs facilitates false-belief understanding in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Paper to be presented at the 15th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2020), Philadelphia, USA. 

9. Zhou. P., Ma, W., & Zhan, L. (2020). Do children with autism spectrum disorder use prosodic cues to infer others’ mental states? Paper to be presented at the Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA), Duke University, USA.

10. Li, Y., & Zhou, P., & Liu, M. (2019). Donkey pronouns from weak to strong: Evidence from child Mandarin. Paper presented at the 14th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 14), University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. 

11. Shi, J., & Zhou, P. (2019). Real-time processing of garden-path structures by Mandarin- speaking children. Paper presented at the 14th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 14), University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.

12. Zhang, Y. & Zhou, P. (2019). Prediction or processing burden? –The online comprehension of the classifier-noun pair in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Colorado Boulder, USA.

13. Zhan, L. & Zhou, P. (2019). Children differ from adults in the interpretation of disjunction: Evidence from an eye-tracking study. Paper presented at the Psycholinguistics in Iceland – Parsing and Prediction, University of Iceland, Iceland. 

14. Horn, D., Jennings, P., Mcgraw, T., Zhou, P., & Ma, W. (2019). Singing facilitates word learning and memory. Paper presented at the 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University (BUCLD 44), USA. 

15. Li, J. & Zhou, P. (2018). The hows and whys of child Mandarin. Paper presented at the 8th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America Conference (GALANA-8), Indiana University, USA.  

16. Giblin, I., Shi, J., Zhou, P., Cory, B., & Crain, S. (2018). The spontaneous eMERGEnce of recursion in child language. Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 43), Boston University, USA.  

17. Ma, W., & Zhou, P. (2018). Deciding the referent of a new word: the acquisition of classifiers. Poster presented at the 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 43), Boston University, USA.   

18. Zhao, S., & Zhou, P. (2018). Logical mind of smaller people: children’s understanding of implicatures. Paper presented at the 30th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-30), Ohio State University, USA. 

19. Li, Y., Zhou, P., & Liu, M. (2018). Donkey sentences: From weak to strong. Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Formal Linguistics, Zhejiang University, China.

20. Gao, L., Ma, W., & Zhou, P. (2016). A reduced sensitivity to tones in young learners’ word recognition. Poster presented at the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 41), Boston, USA.  

21. Gao, N., Zhou, P., Thornton, R., & Crain, S. (2016). The interpretation of disjunction in verb phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 7th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America Conference (GALANA-7), University of Illinois, USA.

22. Gao, N., Zhou, P., Thornton, R., & Crain, S. (2016). The interpretation of disjunction in verb phrase ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese. Poster presented at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders Annual Workshop, The Fairmont Resort, Leura. 

23. Huang, H., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2016). Children’s knowledge of disjunction. Poster presented at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders Annual Workshop, The Fairmont Resort, Leura. 

24. Gao, N., Zhou, P., Thornton, R., & Crain, S. (2016). The interpretation of disjunction involving negative linguistic contexts in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the Workshop “Disjunction days: Theoretical and experimental perspectives on the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction”, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany. 

25. Zhou, P., Ma, W., Crain, S., & Zhan, L. (2015). Three-year-olds make rapid use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence comprehension. Poster presented at the 40th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 40), Boston, USA.  

26. Ma, W., Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Gao, L. (2015). Vowel and tone processing in young tonal learners: A functional reorganization of tones. Poster presented at the 40th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD40), Boston, USA. 

27. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2015). The use of linguistic cues in thematic role assignment by high-functioning children with autism. Paper presented at the 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA 12), Nantes, France. 

28. Gao, N., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2015). The interpretation of the interplay between ‘or’ and ‘every’ in Mandarin. Poster presented at the 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA 12), Nantes, France.

29. Ma, W., Zhou, P., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Influences of vowel and tone change on young Mandarin-speakers’ learning of novel words. Paper presented at the 11th Biennial Meeting for the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC XI), Victoria, Canada.

30. Ma, W., Zhou, P., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Tone and vowel processing in young tonal learners. Paper presented at the 42nd Annual Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC), Sydney.

31. Ma, W., Zhou, P., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Is that the tone I heard? Mandarin-speaking three-year-olds’ representation of lexical tones in novel words. Poster presented at the 2015 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, USA. 

32. Ma, W., Zhou, P., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Mandarin-speaking three-year-olds’ representation of lexical tones in familiar words. Poster presented at the 2015 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, USA. 

33. Zhou, P., Ma, W., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Tone and segmental processing in Mandarin-speaking three-year-olds. Poster presented at the 2015 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, USA. 

34. Zhou, P., Ma, W., Gao, L., & Crain, S. (2015). Influences of vowel and tone change on three-year-old Mandarin-speakers’ learning of novel words. Poster presented at the 2015 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, USA. 

35. Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2015). Free choice inferences are not conjunctive entailments in child language. Poster presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, United States.  

36. Crain, S., An, S., Zhou, P. & Thornton, R. (2015). Dou and disjunction in child  Mandarin. Paper presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, United States.    

37. Zhou, P., Crain, S., Gao, L., & Tang, Y. (2014). Aspectual marking in Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism. Paper presented at the 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, United States.   

38. Zhou, P., Crain, S., Gao, L., & Tang, Y. (2014). The use of grammatical morphemes by Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism. Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Formal Linguistics in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Acquisition, Language Disorder and Language Assessment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.  

39. An, S., Thornton, R., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2014). Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of disjunction in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) structures. Paper presented at the 10th Conference on Generative Linguistics in the Old World, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. 

40. An, S., Thornton, R., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2014). Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the quantifier dou. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the IACL & the 26th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, University of Maryland, United States. 

41. Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Zhan, L. (2013). Anticipatory eye movements in children’s processing of grammatical aspect. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, United States. 

42. Moscati., V., Zhan, L., & Zhou, P. (2013). Reasoning on possibilities – an eye tracking study on modal knowledge. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, United States. 

43. Zhan, L., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2013). Going beyond the information that is perceived: the hypothetical property of “if”-conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Psycholinguistics in China, Fuzhou, China.  

44. Gao, N., Gao, L., & Zhou, P. (2013). Children’s innate knowledge of logic – evidence from Mandarin-speaking children’s understanding of double negative structures. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Psycholinguistics in China, Fuzhou, China. 

45. Tieu, L., Romoli, J., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2013). Children can compute ‘any’ free choice inference. Paper presented at the Workshop on the Acquisition of Quantification, University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States. 

46. An, S., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2013). Parsing strategies and locality constraints in child Mandarin. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2013, University of Oldenburg, Germany.

47. Zhou, P., Romoli, J., & Crain, S. (2013). Children’s knowledge of alternatives. Paper presented at the 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference, University of California at Santa Cruz, United States. 

48. Zhan, L., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2013). The hypothetical property of “if”-statements: a visual-world paradigm eye-tracking study. Paper presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of South Carolina, United States. 

49. Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2012). The logic of double negation in child language. Paper presented at the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, United States. 

50. Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2012). Lexical aspect and the use of negation by Mandarin-speaking children. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition- North America 5, United States.  

51. Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2012). When two negatives make a positive in child Mandarin. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America 5, United States. 

52. Zhan, L., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2012). The anticipatory effects of focus operators: a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. Paper presented at the 9th Conference of Generative Linguistics in the Old World Asia, Japan. 

53. Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Zhan, L. (2012). Children’s pragmatic use of prosody in sentence processing. Paper presented at the GLOW workshop on “Production and perception of prosodically-encoded information structure”, University of Potsdam, Germany. 

54. Thornton, R., Crain, S., Zhou, P., Notley, A., & Goro, T. (2012). The latest scoop on scope in child language. Paper presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, United States. 

55. Crain, S., Goro, T., Zhou, P., & Notley, A. (2012). Polarity meets focus in child language. Paper presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, United States.

56. Zhou, P., Goro, T., & Notley, A. (2011). The logic of focus in child language. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2011, Thessaloniki, Greece. 

57. Crain, S., Goro, T., Notley, A., & Zhou, P. (2011). A parametric account of scope in child language. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2011, Thessaloniki, Greece. 

58. Zhou, P., Su, Y., & Crain, S. (2010). The role of prosody in children’s ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 13th China International Conference on Contemporary Linguistics, Shanghai, China. 

59. Zhou, P., Crain, S., Gao, L., & Zhan, L. (2010). The role of prosody in children’s focus identification. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America 4, Toronto, Canada. 

60. Zhou, P., Su, Y., Crain, S., Gao, L., & Zhan, L. (2010). Children’s use of prosodic information in ambiguity resolution. Paper presented at the 8th Conference of Generative Linguistics in the Old World Asia, Beijing, China.

61. Zhou, P., Su, Y., Crain, S., Gao, L., & Zhan, L. (2010). The role of prosody in children’s ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on Chinese Acquisition and Cognition, Beijing, China. 

61. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2009). Dou-quantification in child Mandarin. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2009, Lisbon, Portugal. 

63. Notley, A., Zhou, P., Jensen, B., & Crain, S. (2009). Children’s interpretation of ‘before’ and ‘or’ in English and Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Formal Linguistics, Beijing, China. 

64. Zhou, P. (2009). Children’s understanding of DOU in Chinese. Paper presented at the 7th Conference on Generative Linguistics in the Old World, Hyderabad, India.  

65. Notley, A., Zhou, P., Jensen, B., & Crain, S. (2009). Children’s interpretation of ‘before’ and ‘or’ in English and Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 7th Conference on Generative Linguistics in the Old World, Hyderabad, India. 

66. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2009). Focus identification in child Mandarin. Paper presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, California, United States. 

67. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2008). Focus in child language: evidence from the acquisition of Chinese. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America 3, University of Connecticut, United States. 

68. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2008). Scope assignment in Chinese: why children and adults differ. Paper presented at the 9th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, Tokyo, Japan.  

69. Zhou, P., & Gao, L. (2007). L1 processing of relative scope in Chinese. Paper presented at the 12th International Conference on the Processing of East Asia Related Languages, Tainan, Taiwan.   

Invited talks

70. Zhou, P. (2021). Language comprehension in preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD.  Keynote talk to be presented at the 2nd Asia-Pacific Babylab Constellation Conference (ABC Conference 2021) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. 

71. Shi, J., & Zhou, P. (2020). Real-time comprehension of garden-path constructions by preschool Mandarin-speaking children. Invited talk presented at the 3rd Workshop on Language Disorders, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.

72. Zhou, P. (2019). How child language and cognitive development can inform us about artificial intelligence (AI) research? Invited talk presented at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. 

73. Zhou, P. (2019). What is impaired and what is spared: Sentence comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder. Invited talk presented at the 2nd Workshop on Language Disorders, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.

74. Zhou, P. (2019). Sentence comprehension in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder. Invited talk presented at the Workshop on Language and Autism, Peking University, Beijing, China. 

75. Zhou, P. (2018). The hows and whys of child Mandarin. Invited talk presented at the Language Acquisition Workshop (LAW18), Macquarie University, Australia.

76. Zhou, P. (2017). Sentence comprehension in Mandarin-speaking children with autism. Keynote talk presented at the Second International Symposium on Chinese Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (ISOCTAL-2), University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.  

77. Zhou, P. (2016). Designing a child experiment using the Truth Value Judgement Task. Invited talk presented at the Workshop on Experimental Approaches to East Asian Linguistics, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, United States. 

78. Zhou, P. (2016). The use of morphosyntactic cues in online sentence comprehension by young Mandarin-speaking children. Invited talk presented at the Workshop on Experimental Approaches to East Asian Linguistics, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, United States. 

79. Zhou, P. (2015). Children’s acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. Invited talk presented at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China.  

80. Zhou, P. (2015). The use of morphosyntactic cues in online sentence comprehension by young Mandarin-speaking children. Invited talk presented at the Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.  

81. Zhou, P. (2015). The acquisition of logical connectives: A cross-linguistic perspective. Invited talk presented at the MILANGUAGE Spring School of Language, Milan, Italy. 

82. Zhou, P. (2015). The use of morphosyntactic cues in online sentence comprehension by young children. Invited talk presented at the MILANGUAGE Spring School of Language, Milan, Italy. 

83. Zhou, P. (2015). The acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: Is it that difficult to learn? Invited talk presented at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy. 

84. Zhou, P. (2015). Free choice and wh-words in child Mandarin. Invited talk presented at the East Asian Language Acquisition Workshop, Suzhou, China. 

85. Zhou, P. (2014). Children’s understanding of the pragmatic function of prosody in sentence comprehension. Invited talk presented at the Symposium “The role of prosody in the development of communicative intentions” at the 13th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

86. Zhou, P. (2013). Child language development. Invited talk at the Training Workshop for Special Education School Teachers in Beijing, Beijing, China. 

87. Zhou, P. (2013). Children’s knowledge of grammatical aspect in Mandarin Chinese. Invited talk at the Australia-China Science Research Fund Hearing Impairment and Language Acquisition Workshop, Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), Beijing, China. 

88. Zhou, P. (2013). Methodologies in the study of child language development. Invited talk at the China Speech Therapy Week, Changsha, China. 

89. Zhou, P. (2013). What does eye-tracking reveal about children’s linguistic knowledge? Invited talk at the 19th International Congress of Linguists, Geneva, Switzerland. 

90. Zhou, P. (2012). Lexical aspect and the use of negation by Mandarin-speaking children. Invited talk at BLCU, Beijing, China. 

91. Zhou, P. (2012). Focus interpretation at the interface. Invited talk at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

92. Zhou, P. (2011). Parsing ambiguities: children’s pragmatic use of prosody in sentence processing. Invited talk at the Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

93. Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2011). Principles and parameters of scope in child language. Invited talk at the Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China. 

94. Zhou, P. (2011). An introduction to child language development. Invited talk at BLCU, Beijing, China.

95. Zhou, P. (2010). Another look at “the observation of isomorphism”. Invited talk at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.   

96. Zhou, P. (2010). Interface conditions in child Mandarin. Invited talk at BLCU, Beijing, China.

97. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2009). Children’s interpretation of wh-words in downward entailing contexts vs. non-downward entailing contexts. Invited talk at BLCU, Beijing, China. 

98. Zhou, P. (2008). How do Mandarin-speaking children understand zhiyou ‘only’? Invited talk at BLCU, Beijing, China.