L2 Chinese: Grammatical development and processing

Two recent books (Jiang, 2014, Advances in Chinese as a second language; Wang, 2013, Grammatical development of Chinese among non-native speakers) provide new resources for exploring the role of processing in acquiring Chinese as a second language (L2). This review article summarizes, assesses and compares some of the findings in these books with reference to current interests in L2 sentence processing and other research findings in L2 Chinese. It is shown that there have been serious attempts to link acquisition and processing of L2 Chinese, and that Chinese offers rich materials to study how L2 learners develop sensitivity to semantic and discourse conditions on L2 structures and acquire new grammatical features associated with them through parsing the input. However, to reach this goal, a more fine-grained approach to L2 Chinese structures and their processability needs to be taken.