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Department of Cognitive Science

Likan Zhan

Mr Likan Zhan

Contact Details

Office : 3.722
Phone : +61 2 9850 4440
Fax : +61 2 9850 6059
email : likan.zhan@mq.edu.au
Homepage : https://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/members/profile.html?memberID=560

External Address

Department of Cognitive Science
Australian Hearing Hub
16 University Avenue
Macquarie University NSW 2109

Profile

Conditional statements (if…, then…) are widely used in ordinary reasoning, and have proven to be critical in the assessment of when people are behaving logically (rationally). The “if…” clause is called the antecedent, and the “then…” clause is called the consequent. In classical logic, a conditional statement is false in just one circumstance, when the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. If the antecedent is false, or if the consequent is true, the corresponding conditional statement is true, according to classical logic. It follows that the conditional statement “If Julia wins the next election, then Tony will become a priest” is true if Julia doesn’t win the next election. Such apparent discrepancies between the conditional of classical logic and the way conditionals are interpreted in human languages are the focus of my research. I am attempting to answer three basic questions: How are conditional statements interpreted across languages? How are conditional statements used by children and adults in reasoning tasks? What is the relationship between conditionals in classical logic and in human languages?

Thesis Details

Are we logic? An experimental study of if-conditional.

  • Scholarship : iMQRES
  • Workload : full time
  • Supervisors : Distinguished Professor Stephen Crain and Associate Professor Drew Khlentzos

Selected Publications

Periodicals

  • Zhou, P., Su, Y., Crain, S., Gao, L.Q., & Zhan, L.K. (2012). Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: A view from Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 39, 687-730. doi:10.1017/S0305000911000249
  • Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Zhan, L.K. (2012). Sometimes children are as good as adults: The pragmatic use of prosody in children's on-line sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 67, 149-164. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.005

Conference Presentations, Colloquia, and other presentations

  • Zhan, L.K., Crain, S., & Zhou, P. (2012, September). The anticipatory effects of focus operators: A visual-world eye-tracking experiment. Paper presented at the 9th Conference of Generative Linguistics in the Old World Asia (GLOW-in-Asia IX), Mie University, Japan.
  • Zhou, P., Crain, S., & Zhan, L.K. (2012, March). Children’s pragmatic use of prosody in sentence processing. Paper presented at the 35th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Workshop: Production and Perception of Prosodically-Encoded Information Structure, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
  • Zhou, P., Crain, S., Gao, L.Q., & Zhan, L.K. (2010, September). The role of prosody in children's focus identification. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America 4 (GALANA-4), Toronto, Canada.
  • Zhou, P., Su, Y., Crain, S., Gao, L.Q., & Zhan, L.K. (2010, August). Children's use of prosodic information in ambiguity resolution. Paper presented at the 8th Conference of Generative Linguistics in the Old World Asia (GLOW-in-Asia 8), Beijing, China.
  • Zhou, P., Su, Y., Crain, S., Gao, L.Q., & Zhan, L.K. (2010, April). The role of prosody in children's ambiguity resolution: A view from Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on Chinese Acquisition and Cognition, Beijing, China.