讲座一Speaker: Zhen YuanTitle: Optical mapping of brain activation during bilingual translationTime: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 13 January 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
About the SpeakerDr. Yuan is an associate professor with the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) at University of Macau (UM). He also has the second appointment as the Interim Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at UM. His academic investigation is focused on cutting-edge research and development in laser, ultrasound and EEG/fMRI-related biomedical technologies as well as their clinical/pre-clinical applications in cognitive neuroscience and brain disorders. He has achieved national and international recognition through over 200 SCI publications in high ranked journals in his field such as Behaviour Research and Therapy, Neuroscience,The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Brain Topography, Neurophotonics, Biological Psychiatry, Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging，Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Optics Letters, Optics Express, and Applied Physics Letters. He is the editorial board member of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, editor of Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, senior associate editor of BMC Medical Imaging, and associate editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He is a senior member of OSA and SPIE and committee member of Chinese Biomedical Optical Society.
Optical mapping of brain activation during bilingual translation Zhen YuanFaculty of Health Sciences/Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau Translating from Chinese into another language or vice versa is becoming a widespread phenomenon. However, current neuroimaging studies are insufficient to reveal the complex cognitive mechanism underlying translation asymmetry during Chinese/English sight or simultaneous translation. In this talk, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to inspect the brain activation patterns associated with Chinese/English sight translation. In addition, we also examined the neural mechanism associated with three translation strategies regarding Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting. Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html) 讲座二Speaker: Shravan VasishthTitle: Case and Agreement Attraction in Armenian: Experimental and Computational InvestigationsTime: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 10 March 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
About the SpeakerShravan Vasishth received a BA (Honours) in Japanese from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi (1989), an MA in Linguistics (1992) also from JNU, an MS in Computer and Information Science and a PhD in Linguistics from Ohio State University (2002), and an MSc in Statistics from Sheffield, UK (2015). After a two-year postdoc at Saarland University’s Computational Linguistics department, he joined the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2004, where he has been full professor since 2008. He has worked as a patent translator in a law firm in Osaka, translating patents from Japanese to English. Fun fact: Shravan owns a real Japanese sword which he knows how to use; he has a second-degree black belt in the Japanese martial art Iaido (居合道, swordsmanship). When he was living in Japan, he won a state (Hyogo prefecture) and a national Iaido championship in Japan. He also practises Tai Chi and Qi Gong in Berlin, with Klaus-Dieter Zarn. Vasishth’s research group develops computational models of human sentence comprehension. He is co-developer of the leading model of retrieval processes in sentence processing (Lewis and Vasishth, Cognitive Science, 2005; Vasishth et al., TiCS, 2019). A major research interest is in developing computational models of impairment in aphasia (Patil et al., 2016, Maetzig et al. 2018, Lisson et al., 2020). He is also interested in statistical theory and practice, particularly the applications of Bayesian methods to data analysis and computational modeling, and in open science, transparency in research, and good scientific practice. He has co-authored many tutorial articles on applying modern statistical methods in psycholinguistics (e.g., Schad, Betancourt, Vasishth, Psychological Methods, 2020), and methodological articles illustrating the consequences of basing inferences on underpowered studies in psycholinguistics (Vasishth et al., JML 2018). Shravan runs an annual week-long summer school in statistical methods for linguistics and psychology that covers both frequentist and Bayesian methods and attracts approximately 350 applications every year (https://vasishth.github.io/smlp/). Case and Agreement Attraction in Armenian: Experimental and Computational Investigations Shravan Vasishth Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, GermanyEmail: vasishth@uni-potsdam.de URL: vasishth.github.io In reading studies, agreement attraction is often taken to refer to the fact that the auxiliary verb are in (1) is read faster than in (2):(1)The key to the cabinets are on the table.(2)The key to the cabinet are on the table.What’s surprising about this finding is that both sentences are equally ungrammatical. Why would (1) be easier to process than (2)? There are various theoretical explanations for this effect, ranging from a presumed misretrieval of the non-subject noun cabinets (the retrieval account), to feature overwriting of the subject noun’s number feature (hereafter, encoding accounts). In this talk, I discuss two issues related to agreement attraction. First, can distinctive case marking on the nouns attenuate interference effects? Previous studies have suggested that, in production, distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces agreement attraction; theory predicts that this should happen in sentence comprehension as well. To answer this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different cases. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. The second issue we consider is: which theoretical account explains agreement attraction data better, encoding or retrieval? We carried out a self-paced reading study in which we elicited information about which noun might have been retrieved; then we computationally implement several competing models of agreement attraction, and show through a quantitative evaluation of the models that encoding accounts provide a superior explanation for the data than retrieval theories, at least for the Armenian data considered here. Background reading:Serine Avetisyan, Sol Lago, and Shravan Vasishth. Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension? Journal of Memory and Language, 112, 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087Dario Paape, Serine Avetisyan, Sol Lago, and Shravan Vasishth. Modeling misretrieval and feature substitution in agreement attraction: A computational evaluation. 2020. Preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/957e3/ Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html) 讲座三Speaker: Brendan WeekesTitle: Bilingual BrainsTime: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 24 March 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
About the SpeakerProfessor Weekes is the Foundation Chair in Communication Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Director of the Laboratory for Communication Science also at HKU. Professor Weekes is an internationally recognized expert in the field of language and cognitive processing in speakers who have communication disorders as well as the application of cognitive neuroscience methods to the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment. He is on the editorial boards of Aphasiology, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Languages, Language Science, and Psicologia reflecting his interests in communication disorders and experimental psychology in different languages. He has also served on expert panels for the Australian Research Council, British Academy, BBSRC, the Economic and Social Research Council, MultiLing at the University of Oslo, Research Grants Council Hong Kong, Royal Society, UK Medical Research Council and the National Science Foundation, USA. He is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and currently a Visitor in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge and was Ambassador for UNESCO (2019).
Bilingual Brains
Brendan WeekesUniversity of Hong Kong Many studies have investigated the cognitive processes used to produce words in multilingual speakers. However, one criticism of this research is the emphasis on Indo-European languages. The question posed in this presentation is whether the cognitive processes that have been assumed in psycholinguistic models of language processing (naming, reading and spelling) also apply to multilingual speakers. This question is important because a majority of speakers around the world are multilingual and use very different writing systems. Indeed, even within a language e.g. Japanese and Korean - two or more scripts must be learned to become literate. The outcome of our research in Hong Kong with a truly multilingual population shows that script does matter in neuro-cognitive processing of written words with implications for models of the neurobiology of language. The results also have clinical implications for the diagnosis and treatment of aphasia, dyslexia and dysgraphia in multilingual speakers. Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)