Chia-Wen Lo

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences | CBS · Group of Language Cycles

Language is rooted in our ability to compose: We link words together, fusing their meanings. Links are not limited to neighboring words but often span intervening words. The ability to process these non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) conflicts with the brain’s sampling of speech: We consume speech in chunks that are limited in time, containing only a...

Decoding human speech requires the brain to segment the incoming acoustic signal into meaningful linguistic units, ranging from syllables and words to phrases. Integrating these linguistic constituents into a coherent percept sets the root of compositional meaning and hence understanding. One important cue for segmentation in natural speech are pro...

Memory is fleeting. To avoid information loss, humans need to recode verbal stimuli into chunks of limited duration, each containing multiple words. Chunk duration may also be limited neurally by the wavelength of periodic brain activity, so‑called neural oscillations. While both cognitive and neural constraints predict some degree of behavioral re...

Inducing semantic representations directly from speech signals is a highly challenging task but has many useful applications in speech mining and spoken language understanding. This study tackles the unsupervised learning of semantic representations for spoken utterances. Through converting speech signals into hidden units generated from acoustic u...

Neural responses appear to synchronize with sentence structure. However, researchers have debated whether this response in the delta band (0.5–3 Hz) really reflects hierarchical information, or simply lexical regularities. Computational simulations in which sentences are represented simply as sequences of high-dimensional numeric vectors that encod...

Event-related potential components are sensitive to the processes underlying how questions are understood. We use so-called “covert” wh-questions in Mandarin to probe how such components generalize across different kinds of constructions. This study shows that covert Mandarin wh-questions do not elicit anterior negativities associated with memory m...

Human language has the unique characteristic where we can create infinite and novel phrases or sentences; this stems from the ability of composition, which allows us to combine smaller units into bigger meaningful units. Composition involves us following syntactic rules stored in memory and building well-formed structures incrementally. Research ha...