Hao Zhang

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Shandong University

This study investigated the categorical perception (CP) of linguistic pitch (lexical tones) and nonlinguistic pitch (pure tones), as well as tonal production in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A total of 26 Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and 29 age-matched typically developing (TD) children were recruited for t...

This study primarily aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) for children with cochlear implants (CIs) via the cross-modal transfer of perceptual learning to lexical tone production, a scope that has been largely neglected by previous training research. Sixteen CI participants received a five-session HVPT wi...

Purpose This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Method Thirty-two Mand...

This study primarily aimed to investigate the benefits of an established perceptual training in the production of lexical tones for Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with cochlear implants (CIs). Thirty-two pediatric CI recipients were tested in this study. Half of the child participants received five sessions of high variability phonetic training (HV...

Natural speech plays a pivotal role in communication and interactions between human beings. The prosody of natural speech, due to its high ecological validity and sensitivity, has been acoustically analyzed and more recently utilized in machine learning to identify individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In this meta-analysis, we evaluat...

Purpose: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Method: Thirty two Man...

Purpose This study aimed to examine the developmental trajectory of Mandarin tone identification in quiet and two noisy conditions: speech-shaped noise (SSN) and multitalker babble noise. In addition, we evaluated the relationship between tonal identification development and working memory capacity. Method Ninety-three typically developing childre...

Objectives: Although pitch reception poses a great challenge for individuals with cochlear implants (CIs), formal auditory training (e.g., high variability phonetic training [HVPT]) has been shown to provide direct benefits in pitch-related perceptual performances such as lexical tone recognition for CI users. As lexical tones in spoken language a...

How language mediates emotional perception and experience is poorly understood. The present event-related potential (ERP) study examined the explicit and implicit processing of emotional speech to differentiate the relative influences of communication channel, emotion category and task type in the prosodic salience effect. Thirty participants (15 w...

Objectives: Although pitch reception poses a great challenge for individuals with cochlear implants (CIs), formal auditory training (e.g., high variability phonetic training, HVPT) has been shown to provide direct benefits in pitch-related perceptual performances such as lexical tone recognition for CI users. As lexical tones in spoken language are...

How language mediates emotional perception and experience is poorly understood. The present event-related potential (ERP) study examined the explicit and implicit processing of emotional speech to differentiate the relative influences of communication channel, emotion category and task type in the prosodic salience effect. Thirty participants (15 w...

Purpose Cochlear implants (CIs) provide significant benefits for profoundly deaf children in their language and cognitive development. However, it remains unclear whether Mandarin-speaking young children with early implantation can develop age-equivalent phonological awareness (PA) skill and working memory (WM) capacity as their normal hearing (NH)...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Prelinguallydeafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CI) encounter a significant challenge in perceiving lexical tones accurately due to their limited language experience and insufficient pitch information provided by CI devices. To facilitate their tonal perception, we examined the role of pitch gesture...

No PDF available ABSTRACT The present study employed electrophysiological and behavioral measures to examine the modulatory effects of communication channels, emotion categories and attentional requirements on the timing, neural oscillatory activities and behavioral performances of emotional speech processing. Thirty participants (15 women and 15 m...

Purpose Lexical tone perception is known to be persistently difficult for individuals with cochlear implants (CIs). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of high-variability phonetic training (HVPT) in improving Mandarin tone perception for native-speaking children with CIs. Method A total of 28 Mandarin-speaking pediatric CI reci...

The presence of vowel exaggeration in infant‐directed speech (IDS) may adapt to the age‐appropriate demands in speech and language acquisition. Previous studies have provided behavioral evidence of atypical auditory processing towards IDS in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), while the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms remain unk...

Purpose Pitch reception poses challenges for individuals with cochlear implants (CIs), and adding a hearing aid (HA) in the nonimplanted ear is potentially beneficial. The current study used fine-scale synthetic speech stimuli to investigate the bimodal benefit for lexical tone categorization in Mandarin-speaking kindergarteners using a CI and an H...

Pitch perception is known to be difficult for individuals with cochlear implant (CI), and adding a hearing aid (HA) in the non-implanted ear is potentially beneficial. The current study aimed to investigate the bimodal benefit for lexical tone recognition in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers using a CI and an HA in opposite ears. The child participant...

目的 探讨“多人言语声”语音训练法对人工耳蜗植入术后声调感知能力康复训练效果。方法 研究对象为16例3-7岁双耳重度、极重度感音神经性听力损失并植入单侧人工耳蜗的儿童，其中干预组8例，平均年龄为5.99±0.63，听觉年龄为4.36±0.86；对照组8例，平均年龄为5.95±0.49，听觉年龄为3.77±1.27。采用自编声调测试材料，分别于干预前、干预后和干预结束3个月后对两组儿童进行声调感知能力测试。使用“多人言语声”语音训练方法对干预组儿童进行声调感知干预训练，对照组儿童作为参照对象，不参与干预训练。语音训练周期为一个月，干预组儿童以个训的形式分五次完成对10位发音人共600个语音样本的声调识别训练。结果 前测结果表明二声-三声所有受试儿童平均分辨正确率为47.11%，显著低于其他声调...

Bimodal hearing with the combined use of a cochlear implant (CI) and a contralateral hearing aid (HA) has been demonstrated beneficial for deaf individuals in many aspects of speech perception. However, it remains inconsistent whether CI users can obtain bimodal benefit in lexical tone perception. To disentangle this question, Mandarin-speaking chi...

In this investigation, a picture-character matching task using the event-related potential (ERP) technique was conducted to identify the temporal dynamics of orthographic and semantic activation during Chinese character recognition. The ERP results revealed that the impact of orthography occurred early and was long-lasting, whereas the semantic eff...

The present study aimed to compare the influence of inherent vowel formants with steady-state property (monophthong) and dynamic property (diphthong) on the CP of Mandarin vowels. Utilizing a classic paradigm of CP, three types of stimuli along the vowel continuum were synthesized, including monophthong-to-monophthong and diphthong-to-monophthong c...

The present study investigated the interaction of semantic and orthographic processing during compound sinogram recognition, using event related potentials (ERPs) and a picture-word matching task. The behavioral results showed that participants generally needed more time to make a response and were more prone to make mistakes, when the paired misma...

In this study, the nasalance of sonorant in Hunan Yuanjiang dialect was systematically studied by the Nasometer. The results show that nasal contrast degree of voiced initials is high, and that the intrinsic nasalance of vowels is closely related to the position of tongue: closer to the front or the lower the tongue, the higher intrinsic nasalance...