Past Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unveiling the history of early modern humans through ancient genomes

Unveiling the history of early modern humans through ancient genomes Speaker: Prof. Fu Qiaomei (Professor and Head of Ancient DNA Lab Institude of Vertebrate and Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) Overview: With a growing pool of genomic data from past humans from many different times and locations, it is increasingly possible to study the large-scale patterns of the genetic history of humans over time and space. The speech covers the major features of human genetic prehistory, focusing on studies of ancient modern humans from primarily pre-agricultural cultures in different regions of the world. Analysis of the genomic data from ~45-35,0000-year-old modern humans shows: multipe distinct populations were present in Eurasia; some contributed to present-day populations - individuals from Russia and Belgium show the closest relationship to present-day Europeans and an individual from North China shows the closest relationship to present-day East Asians; however, other individuals highlight lost populations - at least two individuals from Western Siberia and Romania represent populations that did not contribute to any present-day Eurasians. In the period bracketing the Last Glacial