心理语言学线上论坛（9月22-10月20）

讲座一

Speaker: Nick Huang

Title: Probing the limits of linguistic experience in our theories of language

Time: 15:00 – 16:30 pm, 22 Sep 2021

(Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker

Nick Huang is an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a PhD in linguistics and was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut. His main research interests are in cross-linguistic variation in language processing and grammars and how linguistic experience and cognitive biases might contribute to explain such variability. Ongoing projects of his include wh-dependencies, attitude verbs and clause structure, and the morphosyntax of Singapore English.

Probing the limits of linguistic experience in our theories of language

Nick Huang

Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

How does our experience with language shape how we learn and process it? Recent research into this classic question, especially within computational psycholinguistics and natural language processing, suggests that many behavioural and grammatical distinctions can be reasonably captured using just the statistics of easily-observed linguistic features in one’s linguistic experience.

Despite these empirical successes, I argue that a more nuanced view of the role of linguistic experience is still necessary. As support, I will discuss three case studies from different domains of psycholinguistics. The first two case studies draw from adult sentence processing, looking at cross-linguistic variability in double centre-embedding illusions (e.g. the relative acceptability of the ungrammatical The patient who the nurse who the clinic had hired called) and variability in the acceptability of English long-distance wh-questions (e.g. What did Jo think/??shout that Sam saw?). The third case study concerns how children might learn the meaning of abstract mental state verbs like think and want in English and Mandarin Chinese. I argue that “linguistic statistics” approaches, which have been proposed for these case studies, do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the data. I present evidence from experiments, computational models, and corpora to suggest that these case studies can be better accounted for by appealing to e.g. a cue-based retrieval parsing model or learning biases that involve substantial abstraction over one’s linguistic experience.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum:

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)

讲座二

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

About the speaker

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

Yaling Hsiao

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

The 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)

讲座三

Speaker: Francesca M. Branzi

Title: Contextual Influences on Multilingual Lexical Access

Time: 16:00 – 17:30, 20 October 2021

(Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker

Dr. 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 Access

Francesca M. Branzi, PhD

Department of Psychological Sciences, Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

For 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)

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