讲座一
Speaker: Yaling Hsiao
Title: The language that children hear and read: Implications for language and literacy development
Time: 16:00 – 17:30 pm, 6 October 2021
(Beijing, Hong Kong time)
Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638
https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
I am interested in how children learn to read and how humans comprehend and produce language. Broadly speaking, my research focuses on answering the question of "what makes some words and grammatical structures easier to learn and process than others?" We experience words and grammar in our daily language use and exposure to text and speech. Words and sentences appear at different frequency and in different contexts and genres. I study how experience gained through reading and speech shapes how we learn and process words and grammar. I use a combination of corpus analysis, behavioural methods and computational modelling to answer this question. I am currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Experimental Psychology and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College in University of Oxford. I completed my Ph.D. in Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The language that children hear and read: Implications for language and literacy development Department of Experimental Psychology, University of OxfordThe abilities to produce sophisticated words and complex sentences are hallmarks of language development. Language and literacy outcome is highly associated with language experience, in particular print exposure. Children’s books may provide a unique source for rich and complex language that children cannot otherwise encounter in everyday life. To understand how print exposure supports children’s language and literacy development, we identified linguistic features at the lexical, morphological and syntactic levels and compared the differences in corpora of children’s books and child-directed speech. We found that children’s books, including those targeted at pre-literate children for the purpose of shared reading and those written for children who can independently read, were lexically denser and more diverse, contained more abstract and later acquired words, as well as being more morphologically and syntactically complex than everyday speech that children hear. Written language provides unique linguistic input even in the pre-school years, well before children can read for themselves. Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)Speaker: Francesca M. BranziTitle: Contextual Influences on Multilingual Lexical AccessTime: 16:00 – 17:30, 20 October 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638 https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638Dr. Branzi is a neuroscientist interested in the neural basis of language and semantic processing in monolingual and multilingual speakers. She completed her PhD on the cognitive and neural correlates of language production and executive functions in multilinguals, under the supervision of Prof. Albert Costa (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona). In 2015 she was a postdoctoral scientist at the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language (San Sebastian, Spain). After being awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship in 2016, she joined the University of Manchester and then the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (University of Cambridge) to work with Prof. Matthew Lambon Ralph. She is now a lecturer at University of Liverpool, UK.Her recent research focuses more on the neural basis of semantic cognition in naturalistic settings by using a variety of research tools including fMRI, EEG and TMS.Contextual Influences on Multilingual Lexical AccessDepartment of Psychological Sciences, Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UKFor multilingual speakers, language production requires managing competition between lexical representations in the two languages. Still, the extent to which this competition is modulated by contextual factors, such as the linguistic context (bilingual versus monolingual) and/or the type of attentional mechanisms (top down versus bottom up), is relatively unknown. During this talk, I will present fMRI and behavioural evidence showing how multilingual lexical access and cross-language competition are affected by different contextual factors. Then, I will discuss the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic models of language production.Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)Title: The brain basis of Chinese handwriting: insights from functional and structural MRITime: 15:00 – 16:30 pm, Wed, 3 November 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638 https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638Yang Yang is an assistant research professor at Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his B.Sc. from Southwest University in Chongqing, China (2008), M.Phil from Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2011) and Ph.D from the university of Hong Kong (2016). Yang Yang’s research interests include: 1) The cognitive and neural basis of Chinese reading and handwriting; 2) The etiology and treatment of Chinese language disorders such as dyslexia and stuttering. He has published more than 20 journal papers on these topics, and many appear in renowned journals in his filed like Developmental Science, Human Brain Mapping and Brain and Language. He serves as a peer reviewer for some fields' top journals like Science Advances, Cerebral Cortex and Human Brain Mapping.The brain basis of Chinese handwriting: insights from functional and structural MRIYang Yang (yangyang@psych.ac.cn)Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of SciencesHandwriting is a complex processing that requires cognitive, linguistic and perceptual-motor operations. It plays an important part in our daily communication and reading development. However, how the brain processes handwriting in Chinese remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will present the findings of our recent work on the brain mechanisms of Chinese handwriting in children and adults using functional and structural MRI. Handwriting is broadly divided into two components: linguistic processing and motor processing. I will first present the findings from the studies on the specific brain substrates of linguistic and motor processes during Chinese handwriting. Moreover, handwriting is characterized by prominent individual differences. Second, I will discuss the findings on functional and structural correlates of individual differences in Chinese handwriting, including sex, age, personality and metacognition. Finally, abundant behavioral studies have demonstrated high comorbidity of reading and handwriting difficulties in developmental dyslexia. I will present the findings on the brain basis of handwriting difficulties in Chinese dyslexic children, as well as the extent that handwriting deficits share common neural basis with reading deficits. We argue that the investigation of the brain basis of Chinese handwriting not only advances our understanding of the cognitive architecture of handwriting, but also sheds new light on the diagnosis and treatment of handwriting difficulties.Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)