Yan Liu

In light of the dramatic growth of Chinese learners worldwide and a need for cross-linguistic research on Chinese literacy development, this study drew upon theories of visual complexity effect (Su & Samuels, 2010) and dual-coding processing (Sadoski & Paivio, 2013) and investigated a) the effects of character properties (i.e., visual complexity and radical presence) on character acquisition and b) the relationship between individual learner differences in radical awareness and character acquisition. Participants included adolescent English-speaking beginning learners of Chinese in the U.S. Following Kuo et al. (2014), a novel character acquisition task was used to investigate the process of acquiring the meaning of new characters. Results showed that a) characters with radicals and with less visual complexity were easier to acquire than characters without radicals and with greater visual complexity; and b) individual differences in radical awareness were associated with the acquisition of all types of characters, but the association was more pronounced with the acquisition of characters with radicals. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

Grounded in Bandura’s social cognitive theory of moral thought and action, we develop a conceptual model linking supervisors’ perceptions of organizational injustice and abusive supervision with moral disengagement mechanisms acting as the underlying process. Specifically, we elaborate why and how supervisors’ experiences of each type of injustice would trigger their adoption of distinctive moral disengagement mechanisms, which in turn lead to their abusive supervisory conduct. The present conceptual model sheds new light on linking organizational injustice to abusive supervision from a moral perspective. In addition, it also provides important theoretical and managerial implications to our current understanding of why and how abusive supervision happens

Time theft is a costly burden on organizations. However, there is limited knowledge about why time theft occurs. To advance this line of research, this conceptual paper looks at the association between organizational injustice and time theft from identity, moral, and equity perspectives. This paper proposes that organizational injustice triggers time theft through decreased organizational identification. It also proposes that moral disengagement and equity sensitivity moderate this process such that organizational identification is less likely to mediate among employees with high moral disengagement and more likely to mediate among employees who are equity sensitives and entitleds

This study examined the ability to comprehend conventional and non-conventional implicatures, and the effect of proficiency and learning context on comprehension of implicature in L2 Chinese. Participants were three groups of college students of Chinese: elementary-level foreign language learners, advanced-level foreign language learners, and advanced-level heritage learners. They completed a 36-item computer-delivered listening test measuring their ability to comprehend three types of implicature: conventional indirect refusals, conventional indirect opinions, and non-conventional indirect opinions. Comprehension was analyzed for accuracy and comprehension speed. There was a significant effect of implicature type on accuracy, but not on comprehension speed. A significant effect of participant group was observed on accuracy, but the effect was mixed on comprehension speed.