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The Social Brain of Language Learning

The Social Brain of Language Learning Speaker: Prof. Li Ping (Dean and Chair Professor Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Second language (L2) acquisition has traditionally focused on methods and approaches that promote associative memory for vocabulary and grammatical patterns. These approaches tend to enable efficiency in the early learning stage, but in the long run they lead the learner to develop an L2 representation that is parasitic on the native language (L1) representation. The parasitism is a form of ‘accent’ on the semantic or grammatical level. How can L2 learners break away from this parasitism and establish an L2 representation on a par with the L1 representation? In this talk, I present the Social L2 Learning (SL2) framework that draws on theories of psycholinguistics, memory, and embodied cognition. The SL2 hypothesis highlights the significance of language learning in socially interactive contexts and the contributions that such learning makes to shape the mind and the brain. Evidence has accumulated from child language, education, and cognitive science pointing to the efficacy and significance of social learning. Several recent studies including work from our lab also suggest positive brain changes along with enhanced behavioral outcomes as a result of social learning. I will provide a blueprint for the brain network underlying SL2, which enables the integration of neurocognitive bases with social cognition of language learning while combining theories of language and memory with practical implications for the learning and teaching of L2 in adulthood.

Developmental Language Disorder in Mandarin-Chinese Children: Behavioral Manifestation and Assessment Approaches

Developmental Language Disorder in Mandarin-Chinese Children: Behavioral Manifestation and Assessment Approaches Speaker: Dr Sheng Li (Associate Professor Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Delaware) 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 Mandarin is extremely limited. This not only is incommensurate with the large number of Mandarin-speaking children affected by DLD, but also impedes the formulation of mechanistic explanations of DLD. In many English-speaking countries, the increase of Mandarin-English bilingual children far outpaces the number of practitioners who have the linguistic expertise to assess these children. Further exacerbating the matter is the complete lack of formal assessment tools for this population. In the first part of this talk, I present three studies that utilized both experimental and naturalistic tasks that measured executive functions, sentence comprehension, and narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children with and without risk for DLD. Children at risk for DLD showed deficits in all three task domains but within each task, there were subcomponents that were relatively intact. In the second part of this talk, I present findings from a feasibility study which suggested that parents of bilingual children may be reliable testing agent using an online testing platform. Together, these studies provide a richer description of the manifestations of Mandarin DLD, invite future investigations on the cognitive basis of DLD, and have implications for citizen science research and the development of accessible, cost-effective computer-mediated language assessment.

Understanding Language Development and Developmental Language Disorder from Language Sample Analyses

Understanding Language Development and Developmental Language Disorder from Language Sample Analyses Speaker: Dr Anita Wong (Director of Clinical Education (2015-2020) Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, The University of Hong Kong) Overview: Speech-language therapists (SLT) conduct norm-referenced tests and informal observation, and use clinical judgement to make diagnosis of DLD. Before therapy, the SLT will typically collect a conversational sample of the child’s language, and systematically analyze his/her grammar. From the language sample, the SLT can identify error productions, and productions that are not expected for the child’s age. From these productions, the SLT conduct criterion-referenced probes and identify grammatical targets for therapy. In this talk, I will describe a framework for describing and analysing conversational language samples. The framework was developed on the basis of functionalist constructivist theories of language development (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1982; Goldberg, 2006; Tomasello, 2000, 2007, 2009) with reference to description of Cantonese grammar in Matthews and Yip (2011) and Cheung (2007). I will show that the framework is valid as scores obtained from the analysis capture developmental changes in typical children as well as differences between children with typical language and children with DLD. I will also present observation of grammatical errors in children with DLD and discuss possible interpretations.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions – A Pivotal Link in Building Chinese Civilization

Oracle Bone Inscriptions – A Pivotal Link in Building Chinese Civilization Speaker: Prof. Chen Kuang Yu (Distinguished Professor Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University) Overview: Jiaguwen 甲骨文 was discovered 120 years ago by Wang Yirong 王懿榮 in 1899. The term Jiaguwen 甲骨文 (Oracle bone inscriptions, OBI) refers to scripts engraved on oracle bones, mostly for divination and events recording. Hundreds of thousands of oracle bones have been unearthed during the last century. The inscriptions represent not only the earliest known Chinese writing system but also the oldest extant documents concerning various aspects of the Shang royal house, from sacrificial rituals to wars. Shang OBI brought the legendary Shang Dynasty from a foggy mist into a historical reality; It provides the crucial link that allows us to trace the origin and to examine the development of Chinese writing system and it is pivotal for tracing the origin and development of Chinese civilization, from the time of Yu and Xia till modern time. The first part of my talk will use some OBI rubbing samples to illustrate these points. The second part discusses my recent work on OBI, including the chemistry of pigments used in the engraved grooves of oracle shells and bones.

Sinogram and the Brain 漢字與大腦

Sinogram and the Brain 漢字與大腦 Speaker: Dr. Peng Gang (Associate Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong) Overview: The two most distinct features of the Chinese language are the use of lexical tones in its spoken form and sinograms, i.e., Chinese characters, in its written form. In this talk, I will report three aspects of sinogram processing based on our previous studies. 1. Firstly, I will discuss the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals of sinograms which are themselves free standing sinograms, and the interaction and time course of sub-lexical processing by using the technique of event-related potentials. 2. Secondly, I will discuss the issue of hemispheric lateralization of signogram processing, and elaborate the Composition–Age model which seemingly accommodates most lateralization studies of sinogram reading. 3. Finally, I am going to discuss the influence of reading experience (simplified vs. traditional sinograms) on the sensitivity of distinguishing non-sinograms from sinograms.

The Perfective in Modern Standard Chinese: Contexts and Degree

The Perfective in Modern Standard Chinese: Contexts and Degree Speaker: Prof. Chaofen Sun (Stanford University) Overview: The verbal suffix了1 has been treated as an aspect marker (Wang 1965) meaning “perfective”完成 (Chao 1968, Lu & Zhu1979, Smith 1997), “realization”实现 (Liu 1988), or “complete” (Chen 2008), etc. No matter what it is named, its semantics is related to the semantic notion of boundedness. Wu (2005) proposed a SigP to account for 了1’s distributions. However, such a claim fails to explain why the 了 in 我吃完*(了)⼀一碗饭 “I have eaten a bowl of rice” is obligatory as the event with the RVC 吃完 is necessarily bounded. Tsai’s (2008) multi-level account claims that only Asp1 在 and 过 as head of the TP (了1 is Asp2) allows a sentence to stand without a quantified NP as its syntactic object. However, such a claim misses the fact that #我吃过饭 is just as awkward as #我吃了了饭. Both of these sentences cannot stand without a quantified NP or additional information. My study shows that the Chinese perfective marker (Li & Thompson (1981) is actually not as robust as the Russian perfect because of an agreement constraint that is pragmatically motivated. Evidence will be given that when the main predicate of a sentence is not in focus, such an agreement constraint does not apply. That is, although 散步 “take a walk” is a good VP, #我散了步 is bad because of the violation of the agreement constraint with a quantized objective NP when the predicate is in focus as in 我散了了半⼩小时的步 “I took a walk for thirty minutes” is good. It follows that when a sentence has a narrow focus (Lambrecht 1994, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), i.e., the predicate is not the focus of the sentence) 我在海海边散了了步 “I took a walk at the beach” but the locative “at the beach”. In the case the syntactic object need not be quantized. Such a systematic agreement is totally missed in the available literature on the Chinese perfective. The contribution of this study is that the Chinese perfective is rather weak because there is a pragmatically motivated agreement with a quantized object, or other degree bearing linguistic forms. Additional data will be demonstrated to show how sentence-final 了2 and other constructions can satisfy such an agreement constraint where there is a predicate focus in a Chinese sentence.

‘Perfective paradox’: A Cross-linguistic Study of the Aspectual Functions of –guo in Mandarin Chinese

‘Perfective paradox’: A Cross-linguistic Study of the Aspectual Functions of –guo in Mandarin Chinese  Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li (Head of Department Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: The toneless aspect mark -guo is generally viewed as a perfective marker with experiential function. It appears to be subject to a number of semantic constraints, such as discontinuity, repeatability or recurrence, reversibility, and indefinite reference. This article demonstrates that ‘experiential’ is only one of the three main local functions of -guo. Crucial to the determination of the local function of a -guo clause is the boundedness of the verb constellation: ‘experiential’ (atelic situation, typically Activity verbs), ‘deresultative’ (telic situation, typically Accomplishment and Achievement verbs), and ‘ex-habitual’ (stative verbs). We will first elucidate these three local functions and clarify various semantic constraints of -guo before examining a small corpus of 300 -guo sentences to ascertain the distribution of its local functions in authentic texts. Then we will analyze how these functions are manifested in other languages. The evidence suggests that -guo is untypical as a perfective marker; rather, cross-linguistically the lexico- grammatical exponents of the experiential, deresultative, and ex-habitual functions suggest that -guo behaves more like a perfective marker, hence the ‘perfective paradox’. This seminar is intended to be a contribution to general and contrastive aspectology.

Chinese as a Complex Self-adaptive System: Some Preliminary Studies

Chinese as a Complex Self-adaptive System: Some Preliminary Studies Speaker: Prof. Chu-Ren Huang (Chair Professor  Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Overview: Complexity and complex systems have been central to the study of topics ranging from galaxies to genes. Language as a complex system has in turn been at the fore-front of language sciences (Beckner et al. 2009). I will start with the multiple meanings of the term ‘language’ to suggest that this fact could reflect the nature of language as a complex self-adaptive system. That is, as such a complex system at all levels, language can be either aggregated and/or partitioned and will result in another complex selfadaptive system. Based on this, I introduce some studies from my group to capture the overall systemic characteristics of the complex systems, in terms of both the power function relation between units and constituents captured by the Menzerath Law and the small world properties of phonological neighbourhood. The last part of the talk will focus on my speculation of the nature of adaptation by introducing the emerging paradigm/perspective of multi-brain frame of reference (Hasson et al. 2012) and our Conversational Brains (CoBra) EU2020 project. In sum, I argue that self-adaptation Is motivated most strongly by the need to align and exchange information with another brain. The participation and need for interaction with other brains makes the system both dynamic and complex. And the dynamic complexity accounts for the seeming dilemma of constant changes and variations in language vs. the unchanging identities of different languages. This conclusion also points to a fundamental fallacy of current theories studying language from a single brain perspective with static parochial features in terms of taking a wholistic view of modeling the dynamics and complexity of the system.

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language Speaker: Prof. Sir Colin Blakemore (Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Neuroscience City University of Hong Kong Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience University of Oxford) Overview: How language evolved remains a crucial issue for understanding human cognition. I shall examine the still-dominant view that human beings have an innate (genetically specified) mental faculty for language. The functional specializations that are necessary for spoken and gestural communication are extensive and complex – in the larynx, the tongue, the hands, the ears. The capacity to plan and coordinate fine movements of the hands, limbs, larynx and tongue, and to use them for communication and cooperation, have a long evolutionary history. What is harder to understand is how these peripheral specializations became co-ordinated, and especially how brain architectures representing syntax and meaning could also have evolved. I shall draw evidence from three areas: 1) the social function of communication; 2) the relationship between vision and language; and 3) the lessons about the role of plasticity in the acquisition of language from recent research on reading and writing.

Research Exploring Co-evolution of Tools and Language

Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language Speaker: Prof. P. Thomas Schoenemann (Professor Departments of Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University) Overview: The evolutionary process favors the elaboration and modification of pre-existing abilities. Bipedalism, for example, did not evolve via a wholesale replacement of existing anatomy and neural connections, but rather simply the modification of anatomical structures that had evolved for previous types of movement. However, once the hands were freed, this allowed for the further flowering of tool use, and the cognition that supports such tool use. It is a mistake, however, to imagine these evolutionary changes occurring serially. Instead, these changes likely overlapped in time, and influenced each other. This co-evolutionary process would have led to the overlap and integration of different cognitive systems. In this talk I will review research we are pursuing exploring how brain circuitry underlying language may have coevolved with other systems, in particular those involved in tool manufacturing, and sequential processing in particular.