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This study investigates developmental trends in acquiring knowledge of radicals, radical perception skills, and skills in applying knowledge of radicals among nonnative learners of Chinese across learning levels. It also examines the relationship between the acquisition of radical knowledge and the development of radical perception and radical knowledge application skills, as well as how the development of radical knowledge application skills is associated with Chinese word acquisition. The results of this study suggest that radical knowledge, radical perception skills, and radical knowledge application skills do not develop synchronously across learning levels, but rather that each of them shows a unique developmental trend. A linear trend exists between the development of radical knowledge and the application of this knowledge; a moderate positive association is observed between the development of radical knowledge application skills and Chinese word acquisition. The pedagogical implications of these findings are suggested.

Even well practiced movements cannot be repeated without variability. This variability is thought to reflect "noise" in movement preparation or execution. However, we show that, for both professional baseball pitchers and macaque monkeys making reaching movements, motor variability can be decomposed into two statistical components, a slowly drifting mean and fast trial-by-trial fluctuations about the mean. The preparatory activity of dorsal premotor cortex/primary motor cortex neurons in monkey exhibits similar statistics. Although the neural and behavioral drifts appear to be correlated, neural activity does not account for trial-by-trial fluctuations in movement, which must arise elsewhere, likely downstream. The statistics of this drift are well modeled by a double-exponential autocorrelation function, with time constants similar across the neural and behavioral drifts in two monkeys, as well as the drifts observed in baseball pitching. These time constants can be explained by an error-corrective learning processes and agree with learning rates measured directly in previous experiments. Together, these results suggest that the central contributions to movement variability are not simply trial-by-trial fluctuations but are rather the result of longer-timescale processes that may arise from motor learning.

This study investigates how different encoding strategies affect retention of Chinese characters (words) as measured by recall of the sound and meaning of the characters. Three types of encoding strategies were investigated during character learning: rote memorisation (shallow processing), student self-generated elaboration, and instructor-guided elaboration (deeper processing). ANOVA analysis indicates that deeper processing results in significantly better retention of sound and meaning of characters than does shallow processing. Of the two kinds of elaboration, retention of sound and meaning is significantly better with instructor-guided elaboration at a 20-minute interval, but this advantage disappears at a 48-hour recall interval. Comparison of differences between recall of sound and recall of meaning across the three processing conditions reveals that instructor-guided elaboration significantly enhances retention of character meaning.