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Video
Human brain stores tremendous amount of knowledge about this world, which is the foundation of object recognition, language, thought, and reasoning. What’s the neural codes of semantic knowledge representation? Is the knowledge “roses are red” simply the memory trace of perceiving the color of roses, stored in the brain circuits within color-sensitive neural systems? What about knowledge that is not directly perceived by senses, such as “freedom” or “rationality”? I will present a set of studies from my lab that addresses this issue, including object color (and other visual) knowledge in several populations (congenitally blind humans, color blind humans, and typically developed macaques), and semantic neural representation in individuals with early language experience deprivation. The findings point to the existence of two different types of knowledge coding in different regions of the human brain – one conservative, based on sensory experiences, and one based on language-derived machinery that support fully nonsensory information. The relationship between these two types of knowledge coding will be discussed.
Event date: 09/04/2025
Speaker: Professor Yanchao BI (Peking University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Neurobiology Semantics Brain
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
People are now regularly interacting with voice assistants (VAs), which are conversational agents that allow users to use spoken language to interface with a machine to complete tasks. The huge adoption and daily use of VAs by millions of people - and its increasing use for financial, healthcare, and educational applications - raises important questions about the linguistic and social factors that affect spoken language interactions with machines.
We are exploring issues of linguistic and social biases that impact speech communication in human-computer interaction - particularly during cross-language transfer, learning, or adaptation of some kind. In this talk, I will present two case studies illustrating some of our most recent work in this area. The first study looks at a case of cross-language ASR transfer. We find systematic linguistic and phonetic disparities in language transfer by machines trained on a source language to speech recognition of a novel target, low-resource language. The second study looks at a case of social bias in word learning by humans using voice-enabled apps. We find the word learning is inhibited when there are mismatching social cues presented by the voice and the linguistic information.
Together, along with highlights from other ongoing work in my lab, the aim of this talk is to underscore that human-computer linguistic communication is a rich testing ground for investigating issues in speech and language variation. Examining linguistic variation during HCI can enrich and elaborate linguistic theory, as well as present opportunities for linguists to provide insights for improving both the function and fairness of these technologies.
Event date: 25/03/2025
Speaker: Professor. Georgia ZELLOU (University of California, Davis)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Communication and Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Linguistics English language -- Variation Speech processing systems English language -- Spoken English Human-computer interaction
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The idea of translanguaging has disrupted much of the thinking about language, communication and learning and raised some fundamental questions about human language and human cognition. One of these questions concerns an assumption that seems to underlie a great deal of the work on intercultural communication, and that is, speakers of different named languages not only use language differently, but also think differently and have different worldviews. In this talk, I want to invite the participants to rethink about this issue, from the perspective of Translanguaging, which posits that bilinguals and multilinguals do not think unilingually and thinking goes beyond named languages and indeed beyond what has traditionally been conceived as linguistic versus non-linguistic processes. I offer my views on the existing work in intercultural communication and cross-linguistic studies of cognitive processing and Linguistic Relativity. Implications of this common-humanity-based conceptual stance for intercultural communication including business and workplace lingua franca communication, as well as for language learning and pedagogy, and research design are discussed.
Event date: 18/07/2024
Speaker: Prof. Wei LI (University College London)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Communicative competence Translanguaging (Linguistics) Multilingualism Intercultural communication Language awareness
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Neuroemergentism, (NM) is a novel framework which has sought to consider language development as involving the organization and reorganization of cognition and its underlying neural substrate. Work to support this framework comes from studies of language and cognitive development. In this talk, I will focus on two separate levels, the sensorimotor plasticity needed to adjust to new input and the cognitive flexibility needed to select between these competing sources of information. This talk will discuss both these levels with regard to the neurocognitive adaptations seen in bilinguals. This will include structural brain differences in monolinguals and bilinguals that vary in the age of second language acquisition. In the second part, of the talk work that has focused on the cognitive flexibility will be presented. This will focus on the adaptations of the basal ganglia and frontostriatal tracts as a gating mechanism crucial for selecting the correct motor response. This includes newer work which links genes associated with dopamine to cognitive and language flexibility in bilinguals. The ways in which sensorimotor plasticity and cognitive flexibility represent accurate but incomplete conceptualizations of the competitive processes involved in language and cognitive processing will be discussed. The talk will conclude with potential future directions using an NM framework.
Event date: 15/03/2024
Speaker: Prof. Arturo E. HERNANDEZ (University of Houston)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Language acquisition Code switching (Linguistics) Psycholinguistics Bilingualism
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
I will discuss how co-speech (i.e., speech-accompanying) gestures relate to language and conceptualisation underlying language. I will focus on “representational gestures”, which can depict motion, action, and shape or can indicate locations. I will provide evidence for the following two points. Various aspects of language shape co-speech gestures. Conversely, the way we produce co-speech gestures can shape language. I will discuss these issues in relation to manner and path in motion event descriptions, clause-linkage types in complex event descriptions, and metaphor. I will conclude that gesture and language are parts of a "conceptualisation engine”, which takes advantage of unique strengths of spatio-motoric representation and linguistic representation.
Event date: 26/02/2024
Speaker: Prof. Sotaro Kita (University of Warwick)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Nonverbal communication Language languages Gesture
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The relationship between language experience and cognitive control (e.g., working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility) could be very well illustrated by the cognitively demanding language experience of interpreting training. A series of our empirical studies with interpreting students (see DONG 2023 for a review), together with studies with professional interpreters in the literature, suggest that interpreting training may first enhance students’ working memory (WM) updating ability and then WM spans, with probable some decline of WM updating ability between the shift from the two WM abilities. Similar patterns may appear in other cognitive control functions, such as cognitive flexibility (first with switching cost reduced and then with mixing cost reduced) and multi-tasking coordination. These results could be explained by the task features of interpreting (including task schemas and their cognitive loads) (see DONG & LI 2020), suggesting a close and dynamic relationship between language experience and cognitive control.
Event date: 4/12/2023
Speaker: Prof. Yanping Dong (Zhejiang University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Translating and Interpreting and Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Cognition Language languages Translating interpreting
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
我們的日常生活每時每刻都離不開語言，每一個人都會對語言中發生的問題感興趣，但是卻並不知道這些生活中的語言問題有沒有學術研究價值。本講座將以日常生活中的語言現象為例，重點介紹語言研究的選題、研究方法和研究路徑，以期對研究生的選題和論文寫作以及語言的跨學科研究有所啟發。
日期：2023年9月15日
講者：崔希亮教授
主辦：人文學院
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Sociolinguistics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Psychology, Computer Science and Neuroscience have a history of shared questions and inter-related advances. Recently, new technology has enabled those fields to move from “toy” small-scale approaches to the study of language learning from raw sensory input and to do so at a large scale that constitutes daily life. The three primary goals of my research are 1) to quantify the statistical regularities in the real world, 2) to examine the underlying computational mechanisms operated on the statistical data, and 3) to apply the findings from basic science to real-world applications. In this talk, I will present several projects in my research lab to show that the advances in human learning and machine learning fields place us at the tipping point for powerful and consequential new insights into mechanisms of (and algorithms for) learning.
Event Date: 28/06/2023
Speaker: Prof. Chen YU (University of Texas at Austin)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Computational linguistics Language acquisition Machine learning
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.
Event date: 13/5/2022
Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages and Chinese Language
- Keywords:
- History China Written communication Chinese characters Chinese language -- Written Chinese East Asia
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
I'm Aaron! I spent 6 years learning Spanish in school, and graduated barely able to speak at all. That was before I learned HOW to learn languages. Now I speak English, Spanish, French, Esperanto, some Thai, and I'm actively learning Greek. Stick around and we'll discuss what you should be doing to finally learn that language that's been on your mind. A new language will enhance your life!
- Course related:
- CBS503 Language in Society and CBS500 Sematics and Pragmatics
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Language languages -- Study teaching
- Resource Type:
- Video