About

Nan Jiang is a faculty member at the College of Education, specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies. She is involved in research related to education, with a focus on sociocultural aspects of learning and teaching. Her work contributes to understanding educational practices and policies, and she is engaged in academic activities within the college's various programs and initiatives.

Research topics

• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Analytic word recognition among L2 speakers: Evidence from character recognition among CSL speakers

  Acta Psychologica · 2025-12-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study explored analytic visual word recognition among speakers of Chinese as a second language (CSL). Two innovative methods were used: the priming paradigm and the false memory paradigm both involving Chinese characters with another character embedded in them (e.g., -, safe-woman) and character decomposition. Two important findings were obtained. In Experiment 1, CSL speakers were found to respond to a character faster if it was embedded in the prime character but Chinese native speakers showed no such priming effect. In Experiment 2 where a recognition task was used, CSL speakers responded positively to characters that were not displayed in the study phase but were embedded in a character displayed earlier and when they correctly rejected such a character, they took longer to do so compared to control items. Native Chinese speakers showed no such a false memory effect. These results corroborated well with the stroke number effect observed in previous studies and provided further and more direct evidence for the involvement of analytic word recognition among L2 speakers. They raised important questions for future research, as well.

  PublisherDOI

• Analytic Word Recognition Among L2 Speakers: Evidence from Character Recognition Among Csl Speakers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• DART: Distilling Autoregressive Reasoning to Silent Thought

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving complex tasks.However, its autoregressive paradigm leads to significant computational overhead, hindering its deployment in latency-sensitive applications.To address this, we propose DART (Distilling Autoregressive Reasoning to Silent Thought), a self-distillation framework that enables LLMs to replace autoregressive CoT with non-autoregressive Silent Thought (ST).Specifically, DART introduces two training pathways: the CoT pathway for traditional reasoning and the ST pathway for generating answers directly from a few ST tokens.The ST pathway utilizes a lightweight Reasoning Evolvement Module (REM) to align its hidden states with the CoT pathway, enabling the ST tokens to evolve into informative embeddings.During inference, only the ST pathway is activated, leveraging evolving ST tokens to deliver the answer directly.Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DART offers significant performance gains compared with existing non-autoregressive baselines without extra inference latency, serving as a feasible alternative for efficient reasoning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Analytic visual word recognition in L2 learners: evidence from the length effect among ESL speakers

  Applied Psycholinguistics · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Research on first language acquisition has shown that children initially approach word recognition analytically and gradually shift to holistic processing as their reading experience increases, as evidenced by a reduction and eventual disappearance of the word length effect in word recognition. The present study aimed to investigate visual word recognition strategies among non-native speakers of English, specifically examining whether these speakers recognize words analytically or holistically and whether their first language influences their recognition strategies. The study tested native and non-native speakers of English with Chinese or Latin-script language backgrounds on 160 English words and 160 nonwords, ranging from 4 to 8 letters in length. The results indicated that Chinese ESL speakers exhibited a positive length effect, showing slower response times to longer words, in contrast to native English speakers, who demonstrated a reversed length effect, and to the Latin-script group, who exhibited no significant length effect. These findings suggest that non-native speakers are more likely to adopt an analytic word recognition strategy when the writing systems of their first and second languages differ. Conversely, same-script second language learners appear able to transfer holistic word recognition strategies from their first language to English.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining strength of L2 form-meaning connection: A study of intralingual L2 semantic priming

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2025-10-27

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The study investigated the strength of L2 form-meaning connections among advanced L2 speakers. Two unmasked intralingual L2 semantic priming experiments were conducted, with lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. Thirty-eight native English speakers and 40 advanced Chinese learners of English were tested in each task. The stimuli involved L2 word targets that were preceded by either a related L2 prime or an unrelated one. Previous research has used the lexical decision task in this investigation, and the semantic task was also used in the present study to boost the involvement of conceptual connections in L2 processing. Consistent with previous findings, native English speakers showed a reliable priming effect in both tasks, but English L2 speakers showed no priming effect in either task. No task effect was found in either group. The findings provided further evidence for a weaker L2 form-meaning connection among advanced L2 speakers.

  PublisherDOI

• Lexico-semantic organization in bilinguals

  2023-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A central topic in bilingual processing research is how words and meanings are represented and organized in the mind of a bilingual speaker. Research on this topic deals with specific issues such as whether a bilingual speaker has one integrated bilingual lexicon or two separate lexicons, whether a bilingual speaker has an integrated semantic system or two separate semantic systems, and how a word in one language is linked to a word in another and to semantic representations. Multiple theoretical proposals have been put forward, such as the distributed conceptual feature model and the revised hierarchical model. Empirical research has led to some consensuses, e.g., that the two lexical systems are linked to a shared semantic system. Researchers differ in their view regarding other issues, e.g., whether less proficient bilinguals rely on lexical links more and whether bilinguals can access meaning equally efficiently from their two languages.

  PublisherDOI

• Introducing bilingual processing research

  2023-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Bilingual language processing research explores the cognition of bilingualism. It studies how a bilingual speaker’s two languages are represented and organized in the mind and how they interact in language use. It is characterized by a broad definition of bilingualism, a clear focus on the cognitive aspects of bilingualism, a well-defined set of research questions about bilingual representation and processing, and the use of a rich repertoire of lab-based experimental tasks and paradigms. Historically, this research began in the 1950s with a focus on memory organization in bilinguals, but its focus shifted from memory organization to lexical organization in bilinguals in the 1970s. The rise of the information processing approach to cognition, the return of the mental chronometry as an approach to studying human cognition, and the use of computers in data collection in the 1980s all contributed to the development of bilingual language processing research as we know it today.

  PublisherDOI

• Automatic phonological access among bilinguals with cross-script languages

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2023-08-23 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  This study investigated the hypothesis of nonselective access to phonological representations in an integrated lexicon across logographic and alphabetic writing systems among Chinese L1 (first language)-English L2 (second language) bilinguals. We employed three experiments to test this hypothesis, including a lexical decision task (LDT) and a word naming task in Experiments 1 and 2 using the masked priming paradigm, and a self-paced sentence reading task in Experiment 3. Results from the LDT and the word naming task showed a significant homophone priming effect from L1 to L2, but not from L2 to L1. In the sentence reading task, we compared processing time between homophone error words and control words in the critical and spill-over regions. A slower processing effect in the homophone condition was observed in the spill-over region. Overall, these findings suggest that phonological priming occurs across a logographic and an alphabetic script in different tasks, whether reading isolated words or sentences. Bilingual reading involves an integrated bilingual lexicon that is independent of script similarity.

  PublisherDOI

• Bilingualism beyond lexical processing

  2023-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter reviews research on three topics on the cognition of bilingualism beyond lexical representation and processing. They are autobiographical memory in bilinguals, the representation and interaction of syntactic knowledge in bilinguals, and the consequences of bilingualism. Research on the first topic has demonstrated language-dependent encoding and organization of personal events and memories, and that the language one uses to retrieve the memory may affect what and how much detail is retrieved. Research on the second topic often employs the syntactic priming paradigm and has demonstrated an interaction of syntactic knowledge between languages. Finally, much of the research on the impact of bilingualism has focused on two areas: linguistic deficit and cognitive advantage. Findings regarding the former should be interpreted with caution as they often involved the comparison of L1 and L2 processing. Findings regarding the latter have been far from being consistent.

  PublisherDOI

• The Study of Bilingual Language Processing

  2023-03-30 · 8 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This book provides an overview of research on the cognition of bilingualism. In addition to identifying the most important characteristics of this research and offering a historical sketch in the first chapter, the bulk of the book deals with research on four bilingual processing topics. The first topic, lexico-semantic representation and organization in bilinguals, deals with how words and meanings are represented and connected in the bilingual mind. The second topic, cross-language priming, explores the bilingual lexicon by examining how exposure to words in one language may affect word recognition in another and leads to the discovery of an asymmetry in translation priming. The third topic, selective lexical access in bilinguals, examines whether bilinguals can selectively activate one language while suppressing the other. The research on the topic of code switching is intended to explore language control and language regulation mechanisms in bilinguals. The book ends in a chapter that reviews research on three topics beyond lexical processing: autobiographical memory in bilinguals, the representation and interaction of syntactic knowledge in bilinguals, and the consequences of bilingualism.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lijuan Feng

  University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

  4 shared

• Anna Chrabaszcz

  University of Pittsburgh

  3 shared

• Taomei Guo

  Beijing Normal University

  2 shared

• Min Wang

  University of Maryland, College Park

  2 shared

• Chuchu Li

  University of California, San Diego

  2 shared

• Jing Qu

  Northwest Normal University

  2 shared

• Guiling Hu

  2 shared

• Candise Y. Lin

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

Education

• Ph. D., Second Language Acquisition and Teaching

  University of Arizona

  1998