News

Tone recognition/perception by electronic and human brains: With a focus on the human brains

Tone recognition/perception by electronic and human brains: With a focus on the human brains Speaker: Dr PENG Gang (Associate Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Cantonese has a highly complex tone system. How to correctly recognize (by electronic brains, i.e., computer) /perceive (by human brains) Cantonese tones is challenging. In this talk, I will first illustrate how electronic brains recognize Cantonese tones as well as the general error patterns, and compare the performance of recognizing/perceiving two Cantonese easily confused level tones, i.e., the mid-level tone (Tone 3) and the low-level tone (Tone 6). Secondly, I will show behaviorally how different types of contexts (speech vs. nonspeech) influence Cantonese level tone perception, and illustrate the importance of speech context for Cantonese level tone perception. Finally, I will discuss the time course of context effect of Cantonese level tone perception using event-relation potential (ERP) measurements, and the possible cognitive processing underlying those ERP components. Click here for the playback of Prof. LEE Tan and Dr PENG Gang's lectures

"The Neurobiology of Language: Interaction With Other Cognitive Systems" - Presentation by Dr. ZHANG Caicai in the "The 4th World Laureates Forum" in Shanghai.

Online event: WLA Young Scientists Forum: Neuroscience, Psychology and Cognitive Science I  Date: November 3, 2021  Time: 09:00 – 11:00    “The 4th World Laureates Forum Young Scientists Forum: Neuroscience, Psychology and Cognitive Science I” was held in Shanghai, involving several senior world-famous scientists (including Nobel Laureates), as well as selected young scientists. Dr. ZHANG Caicai was the only one selected from Asia. Her presentation was about “The neurobiology of language: Interaction with other cognitive systems”. Here is the link for replay: The 4th World Laureates Forum.mp4.

Hemispheric asymmetry, ageing, and language comprehension: global concepts, local contexts

Hemispheric asymmetry, ageing, and language comprehension: global concepts, local contexts Speaker: Dr HUANG Hsu-Wen (Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong) Overview: To successfully comprehend a message, information acquired through different sensory modalities must be rapidly combined and integrated with long-term knowledge. Although theories of language comprehension often assume that language comprehension arises along a single processing stream, leading to a single meaning representation for an utterance or text, there is an emerging understanding that comprehension arises along multiple, parallel processing streams in which the two cerebral hemispheres play complementary roles. Normal aging is accompanied by changes in both structural and functional cerebral organization. Although verbal knowledge seems to be relatively stable across the lifespan, there are age-related changes in the rapid use of that knowledge during on-line language processing. In this talk I will address how aging affects effectiveness of preparing upcoming words and building an integrated sentence-level representation. I will also share several research works discussing the impacts of linguistic properties on sensory and number processing.

Manifestations of Developmental Language Disorder in Chinese-Speaking Children: A Systematic Review

Manifestations of Developmental Language Disorder in Chinese-Speaking Children: A Systematic Review Speaker: Prof. SHENG Li (Professor and a faculty member of the Speech Therapy Unit Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Seven percent of children are affected by developmental language disorder (DLD), which causes unexplained difficulties in learning one’s native (and subsequent) language(s). Our current understanding regarding the linguistic and cognitive profiles of DLD in Chinese is limited. This not only is incommensurate with the large number of Chinese-speaking children affected by DLD, but also impedes the formulation of mechanistic explanations of DLD. In this talk, I will present an ongoing systematic review of the literature on the manifestations of DLD in Chinese. The searches resulted in 50 articles published between 1997 and 2021 in Chinese and English journals. I will summarize the main findings of this body of literature and discuss future directions for this line of inquiry.

Dr Peng Gang Awarded RGC Research Fellow Scheme 2021/22

Dr Peng Gang from the Department of Chinese and  Bilingual Studies has been awarded the RGC Research Fellow Scheme (RFS) 2021/22. The RGC received 30 nominations this year and 10 nominees have been selected for RFS awards. The RFS aims to facilitate exceptionally outstanding researchers' full dedication to research and development through providing sustained support and relief from teaching and administrative duties. The Research Grants Council (RGC) held an award presentation ceremony to honour academics from the University Grants Committee (UGC)-funded universities for their distinguished research achievements and significant contribution to the higher education sector on November 11, 2021. Related Article: 研資局研究學者計劃 研發創新 惠澤社群 提拔新人 | 星島日報 (stheadline.com)

Dr Zhang Caicai Selected as a Young Scientist to Join the 4th World Laureates Forum

Dr Zhang Caicai, Associate Professor of CBS, has been selected as a Young Scientist to participate in the 4th World Laureates Forum (WLF) to be held on 29 October – 1 November 2021. The WLF is an annual gathering of leading scientists from around the world. It aims to provide an exchange and communication platform to support and encourage young scientists worldwide.

Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - Language Contact and Evolutionary Linguistics: An African(ist)’s and Creolist’s Perspective

[Distinguished Lectures in Humanities] Language Contact and Evolutionary Linguistics: An African(ist)’s and Creolist’s Perspective Speaker: Prof. Salikoko S. Mufwene (The Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago) Overview: The discourse in evolutionary linguistics has typically been on the evolution or phylogenetic emergence of language, in the singular, raising the question of whether modern languages can be traced back to one proto-language some 200Kya-100Kya, in early modern Homo sapiens or to several typologically different languages. I invoke the geography of humna fossils in Africa to argue against monogenesis, without dismissing the likelihood that language (as an abstraction from diverse languages) must have faciliated successive migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa to different destinations. I also use the experience of recent colonial and imperial expansions to underscore the role that population movements and language contact must have played in increasing and complexifying diversity that must have originated in teh African cradle. I show how the scholarship on the emergence of creoles and in African genetic linguistics can shed light on the successive speciation of languages into the modern state of affairs. Invoking recent findings in genetics, I show how poorly Indo-European genetic linguistics was conceived, starting with the construct of (Proto-)Indo-European and invoking language contact only to account for exceptions. The comparative method alone cannot explain how languages speciate. And it doesn't tell us anything about language losses that can be concomitants of speciation. The picture that emerges is a more complex one that underscores the significance of multi- and inter-disciplinarity in evolutionary linguistics.

北京大學海外名家學者講學計劃 - 雙語學習及表征的計算與認知神經機制

[北京大學海外名家學者講學計劃] 雙語學習及表征的計算與認知神經機制 Speaker: Prof. Li Ping (Dean and Chair Professor Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: 學習和使用多種語言是人的一個標誌性能力，對這種能力的科學研究為深入了解大腦和腦的認知及計算機制提供了重要的窗口。最近幾年研究團隊提出了跨學科的方法來研究學習語言的經驗如何塑造人的思維和大腦，證明了雙語經驗如何影響和改變大腦的功能和神經解剖學的變化。根據我們對以漢語為第二語言學習的學生進行的短期培訓和縱向研究，年齡、熟練程度、認知控制，及具體語言經驗都是重要的因素。此外，也將介紹一些基於網絡技術和計算方法來研究第二語言的學習和表徵的最近成果。這些認知神經和計算研究的方法有助於闡明（1）神經可塑性的機制，如學習經歷會導致神經認知的變化，（2）個體差異，如認知能力如何與學習成功相關，及（3）知識表示，如認知模式神經如何反映獲得新語言習得的知識。

Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - Limits on Success in Second Language

[Distinguished Lectures in Humanities] Limits on Success in Second Language Speaker: Prof. Brian MacWhinney (Teresa Heinz Professor of Psychology, Modern Languages, and Computational Linguistics Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University) Overview: Traditionally, age-related changes in second language learning success have been attributed to the termination of a Critical Period. We are now beginning to understand some aspects of the biological basis of entrenchment effects, but they appear to be far more malleable, complex and dynamic than originally proposed. The Unified Competition Model offers an alternative explanation of age-related effects based on consideration of the risk factors of entrenchment, negative transfer, misconnection, parasitism, isolation, and motivation.  To counter these risk factors, successful second language learners can rely on the support processes of resonance, proceduralization, positive transfer, internalization, and participation.

Carrying Information with Speech

Carrying Information with Speech Speaker: Dr Christophe Coupé (Assistant Professor Undergraduate Coordinator, The University of Hong Kong) Overview: A primary manifestation of language is our use of sounds to communicate with each other, i.e., the exchange of information in the acoustic domain. What are the rules which govern how information is carried with speech? In this presentation, we will report two studies related to this question. The first investigation will highlight the existence of a universal trade-off between speech rate and information density, and suggest underlying cognitive constraints. The second will look at how phonetic features, segments, tones and syllables are used to build lexicons, and show that the task to differentiate between words is distributed very unevenly among these sound structures.