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Publications
Publications (42)
Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) research provides important insights into the language-universal and language-specific mechanisms underlying dyslexia. In this article, we review recent advances in Chinese DD. Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthograph...
Purpose
Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures.
Method
Behavioral ident...
Theories of reading comprehension emphasize decoding and listening comprehension as two essential components. The current study aimed to investigate how Chinese character decoding and context-driven auditory semantic integration contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese middle school students. Seventy-five middle school students were tested. C...
Theories of reading comprehension emphasize decoding and listening comprehension as two essential components. The current study aimed to investigate how Chinese character decoding and context-driven auditory semantic integration contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese middle school students. Seventy-five middle school students were tested. C...
The current study compared the language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners and sighted individuals. Both groups performed better on the recognition of native voices than nonnative voices, but the language-familiarity effect is smaller in the blind than in the sighted group, with blind individuals performing better than their...
Compared with the large number of studies on reading of children with hearing loss (HL) in alphabetic languages, there are only a very limited number of studies on reading of Chinese-speaking children with HL. It remains unclear how phonological, orthographic, and semantic skills contribute to reading fluency of Chinese school-age children with HL....
Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chro...
The current study examined whether the blind are superior to sighted listeners in voice recognition. Three subject groups, including 17 congenitally blind, 18 late blind, and 18 sighted, showed no significant differences in the immediate voice recognition test. In the delayed test conducted two weeks later, however, both congenitally blind and late...
This study used the Musical Ear Test [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188–196] to compare musical aptitude of native Japanese and Chinese speakers. Although the two groups had similar overall accuracy, they showed significant differences in subtest performance. Specifically, the Chinese speakers...
Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to investigate the extent to which semantic context and F0 contours affect speech recognition by Mandarin-speaking kindergarten-aged children with CIs.
Method: The experimental design manipulated two factors, i.e., semantic context by comparing the intelligibility of normal sentence vs. word list, and...
Sentence context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours are important factors to speech perception and comprehension. In Chinese-Mandarin, lexical tones can be distinguished by the F0 contours. Previous studies found healthy people could use the cue of context to recover the phonological representations of lexical tones from the altered tonal patt...
The ability to read is essential for cognitive development. To deepen our understanding of reading acquisition, we explored the neuroanatomical correlates (cortical thickness; CT) of word-reading fluency and sentence comprehension efficiency in Chinese with a group of typically developing children (N = 21; 12 females and 9 males; age range 10.7–12....
The goal of this developmental speech perception study was to assess whether and how age group modulated the influences of high-level semantic context and low-level fundamental frequency (F 0) contours on the recognition of Mandarin speech by elementary and middle-school-aged children in quiet and interference backgrounds. The results revealed diff...
Reading plays a key role in education and communication in modern society. Learning to read establishes the connections between the visual word form area (VWFA) and language areas responsible for speech processing. Using resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) and Granger Causality Analysis (GCA) methods, the current developmental study aimed...
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This study followed up Wang, Shu, Zhang, Liu, and Zhang [(2013). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 34(1), EL91–EL97] to investigate factors influencing older listeners' Mandarin speech recognition in quiet vs single-talker interference. Listening condition significantly interacted with F0 contours but not with semantic context, revealing that natural F0 contours...
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Speech recognition by second language (L2) learners in optimal and suboptimal conditions has been examined extensively with English as the target language in most previous studies. This study extended existing experimental protocols (Wang et al., 2013) to investigate Mandarin speech recognition by Japanese learners of Mandarin at two different leve...
Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and non-native phonetic perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers' categorical perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians an...
Flattening the fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin Chinese sentences reduces their intelligibility in noise but not in quiet. It is unclear, however, how the absence of primary acoustic cue for lexical tones might be compensated with the top-down information of sentence context. In this study, speech intelligibility was evaluated when p...
There is general consensus in the literature that a distributed network of temporal and frontal brain areas is involved in speech comprehension. However, how active versus passive tasks modulate the activation and the functional connectivity of the critical brain areas is not clearly understood. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance...
Chinese is a tonal language in which variation in pitch is used to distinguish word meanings. Thus, in order to understand a word, listeners have to extract the pitch patterns in addition to its phonemes. Can the correct word meaning still be accessed in sentence contexts if pitch patterns of words are altered? If so, how is this accomplished? The...
While previous studies have shown that children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in categorical perception of segmental features in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether the categorical perception deficit generalizes to nonalphabetic languages at the suprasegmental level. In this study, we investigated the occurrence of categorical...
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Previous electrophysiological evidence supports categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones at the preattentive stage (Xi and colleagues). In this study, we examined participants' attentive responses to tonal continua in an event-related potential experiment that recorded their N2b and P3b oddball responses. We found that for both the N2b and t...
In speech perception, a functional hierarchy has been proposed by recent functional neuroimaging studies: core auditory areas on the dorsal plane of superior temporal gyrus (STG) are sensitive to basic acoustic characteristics, whereas downstream regions, specifically the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG) ventral t...
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The present study investigated the neurophysiological correlates of categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese. Relative to standard stimuli, both within- and across-category deviants elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) in bilateral frontal-central recording sites. The MMN elicited in the right sites was marginally larger th...
The present study examines the neural substrates for the perception of speech rhythm and intonation. Subjects listened passively to synthesized speech stimuli that contained no semantic and phonological information, in three conditions: (1) continuous speech stimuli with fixed syllable duration and fundamental frequency in the standard condition, (...
范畴性是言语知觉的一个显著特征，长期以来一直受到研究者的普遍关注。但汉语不同语音特征的范畴 性知觉特点及其发展模式迄今为止还很少有研究涉及。本研究利用语音合成的方法分别改变辅音的送气／不送气 特征和声调的基频曲线，生成语音刺激连续体，采用范畴性知觉的经典研究范式探讨了汉语正常成人被试嗓音启 动时间(Voice onset time，VOT)和声调范畴性知觉的特点及不同年龄儿童的发展模式。研究结果表明：(1)成人被 试对 VOT和声调 的知觉是范畴性 的；(2)对 于汉语声 调特 征 ，6岁儿童 已经具有类 似成人 的范畴性知觉 能力 ；而在 VOT这一维度上，范畴知觉能力随着年龄发展不断精细化，但 7岁儿童也尚未达到成年人的敏感程度，说明汉语 VOT和声调这两个不同的语音特征经历了不同的发展...
How do human listeners differentiate one language from another? In this study we examine the contributions of acoustic and linguistic cues to successful language discrimination. In particular, we report findings that reveal patterns of cortical competition as a function of the competition between prosodic, phonological, and lexical semantic informa...
Projects
Projects (2)
Frontiers in Psychology, Language Sciences Section, Research Topic.
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/20927/reading-acquisition-of-chinese-as-a-secondforeign-language
Welcome contributions will focus on reading acquisition in CSL/CFL learners at all levels such as character, word, sentence and passage. Particular attention will be given to the integration of behavioral, electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to reveal the mechanisms underlying Chinese character recognition and semantic integration during reading.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Development of orthographic awareness.
- Development of morphological skills.
- Sentence/passage reading and the contributing linguistic and cognitive factors.
- The relationship between listening comprehension and reading.
- Electrophysiological (e.g., the ERP components N170 and N400) and neuroimaging measures (e.g., activation of the visual word form area in the left fusiform gyrus) of various reading processes.
Keywords: Reading acquisition, Chinese as a second/foreign language learners, Chinese character, Sentence and passage reading, Electrophysiological measures, Neuroimaging measures
to reveal the mechanism of reading and language problems in dyslexia, schizophrenia, ADHD, autism et al.
