News

Language Learning Relies on Brain Circuits that Predate Humans

Language Learning Relies on Brain Circuits that Predate Humans Speaker: Prof. Michael Ullman (Professor Departments of Neuroscience, Linguistics, Psychology, and Neurology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC) Overview: It has often been claimed that humans learn language using specialized brain components that are dedicated to this uniquely human capacity. However, increasing evidence suggests that language learning depends importantly on general-purpose brain circuits that pre-existed humans. In particular, research indicates both that children learn native languages and adults learn additional languages in evolutionarily ancient circuits that are found in other vertebrates, and are used for a wide range of tasks. For example, birds rely on these circuits to remember where they stored their hidden acorns, while rats use them to follow rule-governed grooming sequences. Similarly, humans depend on these neural systems for tasks as diverse as remembering a shopping list and learning to drive. Converging evidence from multiple brain and behavioral studies suggests that humans also rely on these systems for both their lexical (word) and grammatical (rule-governed combination) abilities, in both first and second language. Newer evidence also suggests that aspects of reading and math are learned in these systems. Moreover, abnormalities in or compensation by these systems can help explain atypical language and other functions, for example in specific language impairment and dyslexia. The research has implications not only for understanding the biology and evolution of language and how it is learned, but also for how language learning can be improved, both for people learning a second language and for those with developmental and other disorders.

Language and Aging

Language and Aging Speaker: Dr. Jana Reifegerste (Brain & Language Lab, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC) Overview: Over the last century, the average human lifespan has doubled, rendering the effects of aging on cognition, including language, a vital research topic. Yet the study of the developmental trajectory of language processing has largely focused on comparing linguistic abilities between children and young adults, with less attention being paid to what happens as people grow older. Examining changes in language processing during aging, and what underlies those changes, may also open windows into the neurocognitive underpinnings of language more generally. In this talk I will give an overview of what we currently know about language in aging, with a focus on words (lexical processing) and how we combine words and parts of words into more complex words, phrases, and sentences (grammatical processing). As we will see, it appears that the extent to which language abilities decline as people age depends heavily on the involvement of other cognitive abilities (e.g., processing speed, executive functions) that themselves are vulnerable to age-related changes.

Summer School 2019

Summer School 2019 Date Time Speaker(s) Topics 2019.07.15 9am – 12pm Prof. William S-Y. WANG Language & cognition across the lifespan 2019.07.15 2pm – 5pm Prof. Ping LI Neurocognitive basis of bilingualism 2019.07.17 9am – 12pm Prof. Jackson GANDOUR Neurobiology of pitch encoding from brainstem to auditory cortex 2019.07.17 2pm – 5pm Prof. Chia-Ying LEE Brain and language acquisition 2019.07.19 9am – 12pm Prof. Michael ULLMAN Language, memory, and brain 2019.07.19 2pm – 5pm Prof. Feng WANG Hockett’s design features and study of language evolution 2019.07.22 9am – 12pm Prof. P. Thomas SCHOENEMANN Evolutionary perspectives on language, cognition and the brain 2019.07.22 2pm – 5pm Prof. Fan-pei Gloria YANG Neural pathways for language and language impairments 2019.07.29 9am – 12pm Prof. Ken PUGH Building the literate brain: How learning to read depends upon, and changes, brain organization for spoken language 2019.07.29 2pm – 5pm Prof. Caroline ROWLAND Explaining Individual Differences in Language Acquisition: Perspective from cognition and neuroscience 2019.07.31 2pm – 5pm Prof. Evan KIDD Statistical learning and language acquisition 2019.08.02 2pm – 5pm Prof. Elena LIEVEN Communication and Language: Evolutionary and Developmental perspectives 2019.08.07 9am – 12pm Prof. Dirk den OUDEN tDCS workshop 2019.08.09 9am – 12pm Prof. Salikoko S. MUFWENE Population Movements, Language Contact, and Language Evolution

Comprehension of presuppositions in Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Comprehension of presuppositions in Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders Speaker: Dr Candice Cheung (Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong) Overview: The "pitch", or "tone height" of a sound is defined by the ANSI as "the quality of sound, other than loudness, which can be ordered on a scale from high to low", and many introductory neuroscience textbooks simply note that pure tones of increasing frequency stimulate more and more basal parts of the auditory nerve fiber array, often implying that the resulting tonotopic frequency map can explain pitch perception by "place coding“ resulting from systematic shifts in neural population activity. In my talk I will explain why the  psychoacoustics and neurobiology of pitch encoding and pitch perception is actually a great deal more complicated, but also richer and more interesting than these simple notions suggest. I will present examples such as missing fundamental sounds to explain why simple place codes are insufficient, and examples from studies of cochlear implantees to explain why temporal encoding of the periodic structure of sounds are likely to be at least as important for pitch perception as place codes. I will then briefly review some animal work that has shed light on the encoding of pitch in the central nervous system, and will discuss the relevance of the ideas presented to  speech processing and neuroprosthetics.

The auditory neuroscience of pitch

The auditory neuroscience of pitch Speaker: Prof. Jan Schnupp (Professor Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong) Overview: The "pitch", or "tone height" of a sound is defined by the ANSI as "the quality of sound, other than loudness, which can be ordered on a scale from high to low", and many introductory neuroscience textbooks simply note that pure tones of increasing frequency stimulate more and more basal parts of the auditory nerve fiber array, often implying that the resulting tonotopic frequency map can explain pitch perception by "place coding“ resulting from systematic shifts in neural population activity. In my talk I will explain why the  psychoacoustics and neurobiology of pitch encoding and pitch perception is actually a great deal more complicated, but also richer and more interesting than these simple notions suggest. I will present examples such as missing fundamental sounds to explain why simple place codes are insufficient, and examples from studies of cochlear implantees to explain why temporal encoding of the periodic structure of sounds are likely to be at least as important for pitch perception as place codes. I will then briefly review some animal work that has shed light on the encoding of pitch in the central nervous system, and will discuss the relevance of the ideas presented to  speech processing and neuroprosthetics.

Lexical tone production in Cantonese-speaking patients with Parkinson's Disease

Lexical tone production in Cantonese-speaking patients with Parkinson's Disease Speaker: Dr Angel Chan (Associate Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong) Overview: Currently it is unclear how speech breakdown in dysarthria resulting from Parkinson’s Disease (PD) may interact with the properties of the language spoken by the patient. Cantonese offers a unique chance to test this perspective, consider it being a tonal language with six contrastive tones that signal meaning differences. Given that monopitch is a hallmark feature of PD dysarthria, how would lexical tone production be affected in PD patients speaking Cantonese? And how would medication affect this tone production? We report the first study investigating the pathological status and medication effects from a tonal language targeting lexical tone production, incorporating both acoustic evaluations of F0 curve analyses and perceptual evaluations of intelligibility. The study adopted a group (patients vs. normal; 12 per group) x medication (on-medication vs. off-medication) design. Each participant read aloud 30 monosyllabic words that are tone minimal pairs contrasting in all 6 tones. F0 curve analyses indicated a number of significant differences between PD patients and healthy controls, esp in T1, T3, T5 and T6. Patients were able to start at a (higher) pitch closer to their healthy controls when they were “on-medication”, suggesting that dopaminergic medication may improve their initiation at a more appropriate pitch, and help normalize their production of certain tones regarding F0. Additionally, the speech productions were perceptually evaluated by native Cantonese listeners. PD patients’ ability to produce lexical tones is degraded to the extent that they were less intelligible than the healthy controls, but not to the extent that would severely affect their intelligibility in general. Medication does not seem to improve intelligibility. We discuss the findings by integrating perspectives from both the neurological disease-based approach and (neuro)linguistic-based approach in conceptualizing dysarthria in movement disorders, a perspective that is rarely considered in the domain of speech control in PD patients.

Neurodevelopment of language: A comparison of Chinese and English

Neurodevelopment of language: A comparison of Chinese and English Speaker: Prof. Tan Lihai (Director Shenzhen Institute of Neuroscience, Distinguished University Professor, Shenzhen University) Overview: Contrary to the conventional wisdom, recent research indicates that experience can quickly change both human adult brains’ physical structure and functional organization. In this talk I will first summarize structural and functional MRI evidence from the study of the neurodevelopment of written Chinese and English which shows how brain networks change in response to language. I will then report on our experiments attempting to discover brain activity patterns during a reading-related task in 125 subjects aged from 6 to 74 years. We found that activations of cortical sites for reading all showed linearly decreasing changes with age. These findings suggest that very beginning readers at age 6-7 are already using the same cortical network as adults to process printed words. Our fMRI study has demonstrated for the first time a lifespan neurodevelopment of cognition (reading), and it provides strong evidence against the prominent hypothesis of human cortical specialization. I will also summarize our recent work of translating our basic brain research findings into clinical and education practices.

Neurobiology of Spoken Language Learning

Neurobiology of Spoken Language Learning Speaker: Prof. Patrick Wong (Stanley Ho Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Director, Brain and Mind Institute, Department of Linguistics & Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Overview: The vast majority of language users speak at least one spoken language. Decades of research has been devoted to answering many questions about spoken language, from questions related to its basic structure and units of abstraction, psychological realization, to biological foundation. One intriguing aspect of spoken language that drives this large body of research and the accompanied theoretical advancement is variability. There are at least two sources of variability. First, the acoustic signal produced by one talker can have a very different acoustic surface realization compared to the signal of the same phonetic category produced by another talker. Second, listeners differ in how they construct a speech category even when the speech signal is identical. In this presentation, I will highlight some of the studies from my research group that has contributed to the body of work that examines variability in speech. From infancy to older adulthood and across typical and atypical populations, it becomes increasingly clear what the neurological underpinnings of variability may be and how an understanding of this variability may allow for constructing models of systems neuroscience of language that capture the range of language performance we observe. I argue that an emphasis on investigating variability also has tremendous potential for translational linguistics that has direct implications for clinical and pedagogical practices.

Neuroplasticity of individuals with congenital amusia: An intervention study

Neuroplasticity of individuals with congenital amusia: An intervention study Speaker: Dr Zhang Caicai (Assistant Professor Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong) Overview: Amusia is a lifelong neurogenetic disorder of refined pitch processing without brain injury. It inflicts a wide range of behavioral symptoms, including poor musical pitch perception as well as degraded intonation and emotional prosody perception in speech. In tonal languages like Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC), amusia further leads to impairment in lexical tone perception. Although the behavioral symptoms of amusia are well described, far less is known about the neuroplasticity of the amusical brain. Intervention studies on amusia have been scarce, and the few existing studies reported null or very limited effects, leading researchers to suggest that the amusical brain has limited plasticity. Nonetheless, the limited intervention effect may be partly due to the suboptimal intervention strategy. To re-examine this issue, we designed and administered novel melody discrimination training with small pitch deviations to a group of HKC speakers with congenital amusia. The melody was presented with simultaneous visual cues (a sequence of short lines varying in spatial height that matches pitch height of the melodic notes) with the aim to help amusics to form and consolidate a visual-spatial representation of pitch patterns. Amusics showed significant improvement in musical perception after training as assessed by the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), a standardized test used to diagnose amusia; more than half of the amusics arose above the cutoff score for amusia. Their improvement also transferred to the speech domain, eliciting simultaneous improvement in lexical tone perception. We observed some evidence of neural changes, with the rebound of P300 amplitude in amusics in some conditions, which has been reported to be a primary neural landmark of the pitch deficits of amusia. These results are among the first to provide neural evidence for the plasticity of the amusical brain.

Computational Research in Psychology and Linguistics

Computational Research in Psychology and Linguistics Speaker: Dr Tao Gong (Professor and Head of Ancient DNA Lab Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Computational Research in Psychology and Linguistics) Overview: In this talk, I review two computational methods used in psychology and linguistics, namely data science and computational modeling. For the data science method, I introduce two examples of using it in psychology research: studying the influence of individual differences in reading behaviors as gauged by eye-tracking measures, and extracting the correlation between social media like Facebook languages and social media users psychological status like satisfaction with life. For the computational modeling approach, I introduce one example of using agent-based model to study the relative importance of perceptual constraints on colors and socio-cultural transmissions to the universality of linguistic color categorization across languages. These examples demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of psychology and linguistics research.