Distinguished Lectures in Humanities

Virtual reality (VR) provides an immersive and interactive setting for language learning, allowing learners to practise various aspects of language in context-rich, naturalistic environments. Unlike traditional book-based methods, VR-based language training is expected to engage a broader network of brain regions by integrating sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. This raises important questions in the field of experience-dependent brain plasticity—specifically, whether immersive learning leads to more widespread or qualitatively different neural changes compared to more focal learning approaches. The talk will open with an overview of short- and long-term brain plasticity, setting the stage for understanding how the brain adapts during language learning. It will then present key findings from research on virtual reality-based language training, highlighting its potential to enhance learning through immersive experiences. Finally, the talk will share preliminary results from ongoing studies on single-session Mandarin learning in VR, along with the recent development of an interactive language puzzle game aimed at exploring cognitive engagement and neural activation in virtual environments.

Event date: 12/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. Johan MÅRTENSSON
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

No individual looms larger in historical accounts of 19th century China than Imperial Commissioner LIN Zexu. Yet, his legacy remains mixed. Most historical accounts characterize LIN’s attempt to end the illicit opium trade as ill-conceived, conservative, and ultimately resulting in his ignominious exile to a remote corner of the empire. In this talk, Prof. ATWILL focuses on LIN’s post-Opium War career to upend traditional accounts of the Opium War and to allow us to see with new eyes how Qing China faced global challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Event date: 29/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. David G. ATWILL
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

In the last two decades the contribution of neuroscience to bilingualism, in terms of discovering the neural architecture, has been enormous. Up-to-date we know how bi- and multilinguals store their languages, how and where they are represented in the human brain and how bilinguals control their languages in order to avoid unwanted language interferences during speech. Old myths that distinct languages are differently stored in the brain have been completed confuted. Neuroscientific studies have also highlighted neural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals for several cognitive functions, even for those circumstances where no behavioral differences exist. Neuroimaging studies have further shown different neural aging trajectories for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals underlining that the bilingual brain may be better protected against aging effects and cognitive decline.

During my presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the state of the art and then illustrate and discuss new research lines such as studying the foreign language effect, the effects of sleep and bilingualism on general cognition, the effects of linguistic distance on the bilingual brain and the importance of study the bilingual connectome. Lastly, we will discuss how to focus on individual differences in bilingualism research and heritage language speakers.

Event date: 8/10/2025
Speaker: Prof. Jubin ABUTALEBI
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

This presentation examines processes of subjectification whereby Chinese gods affirm unique personas and engage humans and each other in intersubjective interactions. In so doing, it develops relational approaches to study divine-human sociability. The vast array of ritual techniques developed over the longue durée in China to allow the gods to “talk back” to humans and create bonds have allowed these gods to affirm themselves as persons and subjects – even though there was also resistance against such developments. This lecture will propose an overview of the ritual techniques available for such personification and subjectification processes and their historical development in the Chinese world. It will then explore some of the theoretical and comparative dimensions of such processes and their consequences for our understanding of subjectivity.

Event date: 10/06/2025
Speaker: Prof. Vincent GOOSSAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Until recently, there were two main ways of obtaining information about words and expressions. The first was to analyze large text data sets (corpora) and calculate the frequency with which words and phrases occur, as well as the typical contexts in which they occur. The second was to ask participants to provide subjective information about words and phrases, such as the familiarity of the stimuli or the age at which they are typically acquired. The development of large language models has given us a third option. Instead of asking participants for information, we can query large language models. The results show that the information obtained from those models is just as good and often even better than the information obtained from people, especially when the model is tuned to a few thousand stimuli.

Event date: 30/05/2025
Speaker: Prof. Marc BRYSBAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

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

In this talk I examine the role of humanities research where nearly every aspect of human experience is turned into data and analysed, in many cases to model, predict and modify behaviour. As a result and through advances in computing technology, artificial intelligence systems have colonised traditional areas of humanities research, including linguistics and language studies. Today, large multimodal models (LMM) can process text, images, videos and sound, potentially leading to the development of algorithmic approaches to modelling society and culture. In this talk, I explore how humanities researchers can leverage the benefits and mitigate the risks of these latest technological developments and prepare scholars for the challenges which lie ahead. I provide some examples from the Digital Media and Society Institute (DMSI) at the University of Liverpool where communication and media researchers are working with data scientists to investigate how multimodal information is re-contextualised across online media platforms. This includes new methods for studying information distortions (e.g. misinformation, disinformation and memes) and public reactions to key events.

Event date: 31/03/2025
Speaker: Professor Kay O’HALLORAN (University of Liverpool)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

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

In this talk, I will present the results of several studies examining qualitative and quantitative empirical research articles from applied linguistics. The studies use both corpus-based analyses and rhetorical genre analysis to describe similarities and differences across the two paradigms. Each of the studies draws on a corpus of published studies from journals that regularly publish both quantitative and qualitative articles on the topic of language learning and teaching.

I first describe the compilation of the corpus, which currently includes 863 studies from 2013 to 2023, and explain some of the challenges involved in using copyrighted materials in a time of calls for open science. Next, I explain the rationale for comparing qualitative and quantitative research in a subfield of applied linguistics. Specifically, I talk about the challenges of a field in which there appears to be a widening divide in the nature of research in the two paradigms along with unsubstantiated claims in research manuals characterizing the two paradigms.

The bulk of the talk will focus on my and my collaborators’ research agenda using our created corpus. Two of the studies focus on the role of theory in the empirical studies. The first study used a corpus-based analysis of the frequency and collocations of the lemma theor- while the second used rhetorical move analysis to show how theory was used in structuring literature reviews. Both studies revealed differences in the role of theory in the two paradigms that show how language choice and rhetorical moves reflect their epistemologies. The third study focused on citation use and revealed some differences, but more similarities. Finally, we have two studies in progress examining article structure and lexical bundles. Taken together, both studies show that quantitative research is more structured and predictable. I end by suggesting possible extensions of our research using qualitative methods.

The final part of this talk will explain the relevance of this research to both teaching academic writing and to the field of applied linguistics. With regard to teaching writing, I will give specific examples of how the various analyses used in the five studies can be transferred to heterogeneous writing classes to help students explore conventions in their own fields. Second, I explain how the studies suggest a widening gap between the two paradigms and how this gap presents problems for graduate programs, journals, and professional organizations, all of which, I argue, need to be more sensitive to acknowledging research in both paradigms.

Event date: 12/03/2025
Speaker: Professor Charlene POLIO (Michigan State University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

The rapid development of artificial intelligence and large language models have led to the language industry and translation and interpreting education programs re-imagining how to engage with these technologies. While some language industry stakeholders seek to leverage these tools to support the provision of language services and language access, others have sought to resist this technological incursion on ethical and professional grounds. The impact of these tools is undoubtedly far reaching, to the point that trainers and educators must now respond to these developments. This talk reviews some of the ways in which artificial intelligence, large language models, and translation and interpreting technologies can be leveraged in educational and training programs while offering possible means to resist uncritical adoption of these tools. The talk provides suggestions on how university programs can prepare future graduates to interface with these technologies and drive ethical and responsible technology use.

Event date: 13/02/2025
Speaker: Dr. Christopher D. MELLINGER (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities