Past Events

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

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)

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

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

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

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).

[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

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

[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

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

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