News

CBS postgraduate student has been awarded the 2022 LSHK Outstanding Thesis Award

Dr. FENG Yan, the PhD graduate of CBS in 2022, has been awarded the 2022 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 recognizes the outstanding theses which contribute to any area in linguistics, including MA thesis, MPhil thesis, PhD thesis and Doctorate thesis. Entitled “Categorical Speech Perception Across the Lifespan”, Dr. Feng’s thesis presents a comprehensive research work on the categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese speech sounds for native speakers at different ages from toddlers, teenagers, young adults, to elderlies with normal cognitive function and mild cognitive impairment. Dr. Feng will give a presentation of her thesis at the 2022 Annual Research Forum of LSHK on 3 December 2022. Congratulations!    Here is the link for review Dr. Feng's thesis.

A Journey into Language: Evolution, Cognition, and Neuroscience

A Journey into Language: Evolution, Cognition, and Neuroscience Speaker: Dr Manson Cheuk Man Fong (Research Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Humans are but one of the numerous species on our Earth. Yet indisputably, we have become "Masters of the Planet", having ventured into every part of the world. A primary reason for this remarkable success is due to the invention of language. In this talk, the speakers survey the evolutionary history of human beings that has made language possible, the cognitive and neural bases of language, the brain changes in normal and pathological ageing, and how they impact our language functions. Along the way, the speakers will also discuss their related ongoing research projects on brain age estimation, language comprehension, foreign language learning, etc. Click here to download PDF for review

Boya Linguistic Forum: Language Variation across the Lifespan, Forestalling cognitive decline

Boya Linguistic Forum: Language Variation across the Lifespan, Forestalling cognitive decline Speaker: Dr XIE Chenwei (Research Assistant  Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Click here to download PDF for review

Dr Chen Si Wins the University's Young Innovative Researcher Award 2022

Dr Chen Si, Assistant Professor of CBS, receives the PolyU Young Innovative Researcher Award (YIRA) 2022. The University received 59 submissions across 22 departments covering all faculties/schools in this inaugural round and Dr Chen (whose research focus is robot-assisted training for children with autism spectrum disorder) is named one of the six YIRA awardees. The YIRA aims to honour young PolyU researchers under the age of 35 who have demonstrated novelty, contributed to technology advancement, and propelled transformational innovation into solutions for addressing problem in society with a vision for a positive change to the future. Each YIRA awardee will receive research funding support of HK$500,000 and personal cash prize of HK20,000 as the encouragement for their research novelty and impact.   Young Innovative Researcher Award 2022 AWARDEE:  Dr. Si Chen DEPT: CBS TITLE: Assistant Professor RESEARCH FOCUS: Robot-assisted training for children with autism spectrum disorder

CBS Associate Professor’s project on neurolinguistics funded by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)

CBS Associate Professor Dr. ZHANG Caicai’s project has been awarded the prestigious fund by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), under the Young Scientist category of the National Major Project on Brain Science. The funded project is entitled “Neurocognitive markers for typical language development and language disorders in children: A longitudinal study based on long-term memory, sleep and brain development”. (儿童语言发展与语言障碍的神经认知标记：一项基于长期记忆、睡眠与脑神经的纵向研究。) The MOST’s National Major Project on Brain Science involves 59 research areas and directions with overall funding beyond 31 billion. Among all successful proposals, Dr. Zhang’s project is the only one in Hong Kong funded in the area of brain and cognition mechanisms under the Young Scientist category. We are very proud of Dr. Zhang’s achievement in pioneering a new source of funding for research in the area of language, cognition, and neuroscience. Congratulations!

Faculty Dean Prof Li Ping Elected as AAAS Fellow 2021

Prof. Li Ping, Chair Professor of Neurolinguistics and Bilingual Studies and Dean of Faculty of Humanities, has been elected by the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as an AAAS Fellow. The Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished” each year. Prof. Li is honoured for his distinguished contributions to the cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling of bilingualism and the bilingual brain. The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Its mission is to “advance science and serve society.” AAAS Fellows are among the most distinct honours within the scientific community. The 2021 class of AAAS Fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators from around the world spanning scientific disciplines.

Analysis of structural and resting-state functional MRI data using FreeSurfer - UBDA workshop

Analysis of structural and resting-state functional MRI data using FreeSurfer - UBDA workshop Speaker: Dr Manson C-M. Fong (Research Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Click here to download PDF for review

How does music reading experience modulate eye movement pattern in sentence reading in bilinguals? A correlational study

How does music reading experience modulate eye movement pattern in sentence reading in bilinguals? A correlational study Speaker: Dr Janet H. HSIAO (Associate Professor Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong) Click here for the playback of Dr. Janet H. HSIAO's lecture

The speech-music relationship: Insights from congenital amusia (tone deafness)

The speech-music relationship: Insights from congenital amusia (tone deafness) Speaker: Dr ZHANG Caicai (Associate Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Click here to download PDF for review

Synthesizing natural speech with expressiveness and personal style

Synthesizing natural speech with expressiveness and personal style Speaker: Prof. LEE Tan (Professor Department of Electronic Engineering, Associate Dean for Education, Faculty of Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Overview: Speech is the most natural and preferred means of human communication. People speak and express in different styles, which are personal and situational. Proper choice and use of expression style are the key to effective speech communication. Text-to-speech (TTS) is the technology of automatically generating speech in accordance to given text input. The latest TTS systems based on end-to-end deep neural network (DNN) models can generate fluent speech that are perceptually comparable to human speech. However, for naturalistic human-machine interaction, e.g., voice chatbot, virtual reality, computer-synthesized speech is expected to not only be clear and accurate but also carry appropriate or desired speaking style. Expressiveness as an innate characteristic of speech is largely missing in existing speech synthesis technologies. Being conceptually similar to conventional analysis-synthesis model of speech, the encoder-decoder type of DNN model has been widely adopted for the analysis of latent factors of variation in speech. Specifically an input speech utterance can be decomposed into components that are related to linguistic content, speaker identity and expression style. Control of expression style and speaker characteristics in TTS can be achieved by manipulating the respective embeddings and recombining them with desired content information. In this talk we will present a few recent studies on DNN based speech generation with personalized voice characteristics and controllable expression style. Successful applications in child storytelling and voice banking will be demonstrated. Click here for the playback of Prof. LEE Tan and Dr PENG Gang's lectures