Shenai Hu

Biographic Data

ID3839423
NAMEShenai Hu
GIVEN NAMESShenai
FAMILY NAMEHu
SIGNATUREHU S
AFFILIATIONSXiamen University
ORCID0000-0001-5829-0977
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS0
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2016
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX0

  • Effects of animacy and executive functions in Mandarin-speaking children’s processing of relative clauses: A self-paced listening task

    Open AccessYuxin Yang, Fabrizio Arosio et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2026

    This study investigated how animacy cues and executive functions (i.e., working memory [WM], inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility) influence 4- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s processing of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses (ORCs). Using a self-paced listening task combined with a picture selection task, two experiments tested distinct animacy configurations. Experiment 1 employed relative clauses (RCs) with…

  • Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Chinese Children: Comparing Developmental Dyslexia, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and their Comorbidity

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Maria Teresa Guasti et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2026

    This study investigated the comprehension of relative clauses in Chinese children (aged 6 years 10 months to 12 years 11 months) with developmental dyslexia and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and explored associations between relative clause comprehension and various linguistic and cognitive factors to enhance our understanding of syntactic processing in these populations. Twenty-two children with dyslexia, 30 with ADHD, 29 wi…

  • Not all emotional expressions facilitate recognition of other-race faces in Chinese infants

    Open AccessShaoying Liu, Shenai Hu et al.ARTICLEPsychological Research2025

    Previous research has shown that the addition of happy or angry expressions to other-race faces can assist infants in overcoming the perceptual narrowing of face race and reinstating their recognition of other-race faces. In the present study, we examined how different facial expressions (happy, angry, fearful, and neutral) influence the recognition of African faces among Chinese infants aged 8 to 12 months. We employed a visual familiarization t…

  • Comprehension and production of relative clauses in Mandarin-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Lin Zhong et al.ARTICLEBrain and Language2025References: 45

  • Inflectional morphology: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia

    Maria Vender, Shenai Hu et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of…2021

    It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the abil…

  • Processing Chinese relative clauses in context by Italian L3 learners

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Carlo Toneatto et al.ARTICLESecond language Research2021References: 4

    The present study investigates third language (L3) learners’ processing of Chinese subject and object relative clauses in a supportive context. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested native Italian L3 learners of Mandarin Chinese and native Chinese speakers. The results showed that the L3 learners read significantly more slowly than the native speakers in all the target regions. Also, in the head noun region, they read object relative clauses…

  • Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Peng Zhou et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2019

    This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of si…

  • A new case for structural intervention: Evidence from Wenzhounese relative clauses

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Carlo Cecchetto et al.ARTICLEJournal of East Asian Linguistics2018

  • Chinese Children’s Knowledge of Topicalization: Experimental Evidence from a Comprehension Study

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Maria Teresa Guasti et al.ARTICLEJournal of Psycholinguistic…2018References: 24

    There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, 2009), we would expect children's comprehension of object topicalization (with OSV order) to be worse than their comprehension of subject topicalization (with SVO ord…

  • The acquisition of Chinese relative clauses: Contrasting two theoretical approaches

    Open AccessShenai Hu, Anna Gavarró et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2016

    This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by using a character–sentence matching task. We found a preference for subject relative clauses that persis…