The past decade witnesses not only dramatic economic changes but also exponential developments in science in China. Given its unique structural properties, the Chinese language provides challenging opportunities to explore both the language-specific neuro-cognitive processes during communication and the universality of theories developed on the basis of Indo-European languages. This special issue reports recent studies on cognitive/neural processes of the Chinese language, using either the behavioural and/or neuroscientific methods. Topics investigated range from lexical processing of Chinese characters and compound words, to the processing of syntactic structures, and to the perception of consonants and the production of spoken words.