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FH New Directions Lecture Series - The Linguistic Cerebellum: Comparisons Across Linguistic and Motor Domains

[FH New Directions Lecture Series] The Linguistic Cerebellum: Comparisons Across Linguistic and Motor Domains Speaker: Dr FONG Cheuk Man Manson (Research Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

CBS PhD Student Wins PolyU Best Research Student Award 2023

Mr Wong Eddy Chun Ho, a PhD student of our Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, has won the PolyU Best Research Postgraduate Student Award 2023. His research focuses on devising an evaluation procedure and treatment approach for Cantonese-speaking adults and children with apraxia of speech. The award, established by the Graduate School earlier this year, recognises and rewards outstanding RPg students for their excellence in research, academic achievement and personal growth. It also intends to promote a sense of belonging among our RPg students and motivate them to actively participate in research-related activities.

CBS postgraduate student has been awarded the 2023 LSHK Outstanding Thesis Award

Dr. Nga-Yan Hui, the PhD graduate of CBS in 2023, has been awarded the 2023 LSHK Outstanding Thesis Award under the category of PhD thesis. The award was offered by LSHK 香港語言學學會 The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong to encourage young scholars at local tertiary education institutions to conduct linguistics research. The LSHK Outstanding Thesis Award acknowledges exceptional theses that make significant contributions to any field within linguistics, including MA, MPhil, PhD, and Doctorate theses. Dr. Hui's thesis, titled "Experience and Bilingual Advantage: An Exploration of Individual Variation", delves into how individual variances such as the age of acquisition, proficiency in a second language, and code-switching habits, influence the organisation of the bilingual mental lexicon and the retrieval of concepts from it. She introduces the Experience-based Bilingual Mental Lexicon Model, which highlights the dynamic change of language. Dr. Hui is scheduled to present her thesis at the LSHK's 2023 Annual Research Forum on December 2, 2023. You can review Dr. Hui's thesis via this link.

How do we understand the age-related increase in semantic priming?

How do we understand the age-related increase in semantic priming? Speaker: Dr FONG Cheuk Man Manson (Research Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: The semantic priming task is an invaluable tool for studying semantic processes in general and semantic impairment in language disorders in particular. To date, the vast majority of semantic priming research has been conducted in the visual modality based on the primed lexical decision task. Regarding cognitive aging, an interesting phenomenon that has been consistently observed is an age-related increase in priming effect, commonly referred to as hyperpriming. Intuitively, hyperpriming can be attributed to a more automatic activation of semantically related concepts, which would in turn imply an improvement in semantic processing in normal ageing. However, because hyperpriming is commonly observed in dementia, it is instead often taken as a sign of semantic anomaly. In the present seminar, we report an ongoing experiment that sheds light on this controversy. Specifically, a primed auditory lexical decision experiment was conducted with 100+ participants aged 18-81. The prime–target pairs were manipulated in both concreteness (concrete / abstract) and relationship (associative / categorical / both associative and categorical). The hyperpriming effect was found for both concrete and abstract pairs. Importantly, no effect of age was found in overall reaction time in the lexical decision task, suggesting that the hyperpriming effect was not due to slower reaction time in older adults. Instead, a larger priming effect was associated with faster reaction time, indicating a genuine age-related increase in semantic priming effect. Our result supported the hypothesis that older adults have improved semantic functions that enable them to automatically retrieve the semantic meanings of words, especially in the auditory domain. Beyond the behavioral findings, preliminary findings from ERP and fMRI experiments will be reported. Click here to download PDF for review Click here for the playback of Dr FONG Cheuk Man Manson's lecture

Regulation of microglial functions by IL-33/ST2 signaling: developing therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease

Regulation of microglial functions by IL-33/ST2 signaling: developing therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease Speaker: Dr WONG Hiu Yi (Research Assistant Professor Division of Life Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) Overview: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia in the elderly population. In Hong Kong, the elderly population (≥65 years old) has been growing over the past decade, now reaching over 1 million in the local population. Risk of developing AD increases significantly with advancing age, suggesting that Hong Kong is facing an increasing incidence of AD. Patients suffering from AD have gradual cognitive decline over the disease course and eventually become debilitated. The financial burden of AD to the medical healthcare and the society is expected to increase substantially. As such, there is an urgent need to develop effective diagnostic tools for early disease diagnosis and disease-modifying therapeutics. Pathological hallmarks of AD include the formation of amyloid plaques comprising beta-amyloid (Aβ) deposition and neurofibrillary tangles comprising pathological tau, which lead to axonal toxicity, synaptic loss, and neurodegeneration. Our group has focused on studying the mechanisms on the clearance of amyloid pathology in AD. We previously demonstrated that stimulation of interleukin -33 (IL-33) decreases amyloid deposition in AD through activation of its cognate receptor ST2 in microglia. Our recent work identifies an IL1RL1 genetic variant, which is located in ST2 genomic region, and is associated with the lowering of circulating soluble ST2 levels and reduction in the AD risk in female APOE-ε4 patients in Hong Kong Chinese population. This protective IL1RL1 genetic variant is also associated with slower cognitive decline and grey matter atrophy. Furthermore, our findings with post-mortem human brain tissues show that a lower soluble ST2 level is associated with decreased Aβ deposition together with increased Aβ-microglial interaction. The increase in microglia-plaque interaction is accompanied by a change in microglial activities at the molecular level. By using single cell RNA-sequencing, we found that decreased soluble ST2 level is associated with increased microglial activation (indicated by the increased expression of specific microglial gene markers). To conclude, plasma soluble ST2 may serve as a potential biomarker for AD and a novel target for AD therapeutic development. Click here to download PDF for review Click here for the playback of Dr Dr. WONG Hiu Yi's lecture

FH-RISA-RCLCN Joint Distinguished Lecture - Age-Related Compensation in Memory Networks and Representations

[FH-RISA-RCLCN Joint Distinguished Lecture] Age-Related Compensation in Memory Networks and Representations Speaker: Prof. Roberto CABEZA (Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University Department of Psychology, Humboldt University-Berlin)

Controlling Unwanted Memory and Adaptive Forgetting

Controlling Unwanted Memory and Adaptive Forgetting Speaker: Dr HU Xiaoqing (Assistant Professor Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong) Overview: All of us have memories that we do not wish to revisit, such as past wrongdoings or trauma.All of us have memories that we do not wish to revisit, such as past wrongdoings or trauma.While constructive reflections of unwanted memories benefit personal growth, such memoriescan become debilitating when left uncontrolled. Deficiencies in memory control may alsoperpetuate the development of psychiatric disorders such as PTSD, depression and anxietydisorders. An adaptive system thus needs to voluntarily control unwanted memories and theirinfluences when needed. My research aims to understand the neurocognitive processesunderlying memory control, and how to help people better control unwanted memories. Weinvestigated motivated forgetting of undesirable feedbacks regarding future adverse lifeevents, and found that people truncated encoding of such unwanted information that lead tosubsequent forgetting. Given that sleep plays a critical role in emotion and memory processes,we then examined how to leverage sleep to influence unwanted memories. Employing traumafilm clips to induce lab-analogue trauma and a total sleep deprivation protocol, we found thatpost-trauma sleep facilitated adaptive processing of traumatic memories in enhancing people’svoluntary recognition while reducing involuntary intrusions. Furthermore, using the targetedmemory reactivation paradigm, we can directly modify and weaken unwanted memoriesduring sleep. This paradigm also allows us to test the putatively causal relationship betweenreactivation and consolidation, and the underlying neural mechanisms. Future directions andimplications will be discussed. Click here to download PDF for review

Prosodic Differences between Cantonese-speaking Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Prosodic Differences between Cantonese-speaking Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder Speaker: Dr CHEN Si (Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Abnormal speech prosody has been widely reported in individuals with autism;Abnormal speech prosody has been widely reported in individuals with autism;impaired prosodic abnormalities can accompany such individuals throughout theirwhole lives (Lord et al., 2000). The abnormalities are strongly correlated with impairedsocial communication (Paul et al., 2005). Therefore, it is critical to promote ourunderstanding of abnormalities of speech prosody and to find training methods that canimprove the use of prosody. This study bridges this research gap by acousticallyevaluating the use of Cantonese speech prosody to mark information structure byCantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ourresults showed some focus-marking deficits, especially in the use of f0 range andduration by the Cantonese-speaking ASD children. We have also created robot-assistedtraining programs to help them improve in the use of speech prosody to mark focus.

How do people understand implausible sentences?

How do people understand implausible sentences? Speaker: Prof. CAI Zhenguang (Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages / Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Overview: People sometimes interpret implausible sentences nonliterally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle.  But how do they do so? In this talk, I contrast a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a nonliteral semantic interpretation account, according to which they arrive at this meaning via purely semantic processing. The former but not the latter account postulates that people consider not only a literal-but-implausible double-object (DO) analysis in comprehending The mother gave the candle the daughter, but also a nonliteral-but-plausible prepositional-object (PO) analysis (i.e., including to before the daughter). I will present findings from structural priming experiments. Participants heard a plausible or implausible DO or PO prime sentence. Then they answered a comprehension question (where we measured whether a sentence is literally or nonliterally interpreted). Finally, they described a picture of a dative event (where we measured how picture description is influenced by the syntactic representation participants have computed for the plausible/implausible prime sentence). The results show that, in accord with the nonliteral syntactic analysis account, priming was reduced following implausible sentences than following plausible sentences and following nonliterally interpreted implausible sentences than following literally interpreted implausible sentences. The results suggest that comprehenders constructed a nonliteral syntactic analysis, which we argue was predicted early in the sentence. I also present experiments where I tested how people understand implausible sentences produced by non-native speakers. Participants had an increased tendency to nonliterally interpret non-native implausible sentences than native ones, but they had no increased tendency to syntactically revise non-native implausible sentences than native ones. It is proposed that people rely more on semantic cues and less on syntactic cues in comprehending non-native speech. Click here to download PDF for review Click here for the playback of Prof. CAI Zhenguang's lecture

The Eyes Are the Windows to the Thoughts

The Eyes Are the Windows to the Thoughts Speaker: Dr HSU Yu Yin (Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: In this talk, I present an eye-tracking study on adult native speakers’ language comprehension during natural text reading. This study employed a novel – the Little Prince – arranged with two different reading paradigms. Two experiments were involved: in Mandarin (simplified Chinese) and Cantonese (traditional Chinese) versions, 30 participants of each language group, who were college students, were invited to participate in this study. While reading the novel, participants had to actively engage in a comprehension activity over two types of tasks: a normal reading paradigm, and a task-specific paradigm. Both tasks were evaluated by specific comprehension questions related to the contents. The sentences were presented to the participants in a quasi-naturalistic reading scenario, in which 4 to 5 sentences were shown on each page, and each participant read sentences at their own pace. In the presentation, I will summarize the characteristics of two eye-tracking datasets, the results of the study, and how the datasets may be useful for other linguistic modelling tasks. Click here to download PDF for review Click here for the playback of Dr HSU Yu Yin's lecture