Ping Li

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Psychology

Purpose The human voice usually contains two types of information: linguistic and identity information. However, whether and how linguistic information interacts with identity information remains controversial. This study aimed to explore the processing of identity and linguistic information during spoken word processing by considering the modulati...

Previous studies have suggested the effect of linguistic information on voice perception (e.g., the language-familiarity effect [LFE]). However, it remains unclear which type of specific information in speech contributes to voice perception, including acoustic, phonological, lexical, and semantic information. It is also underexamined whether the ro...

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made the need for remote data collection more apparent than ever, progress has been slow in the virtual reality (VR) research community, and little is known about the quality of the data acquired from crowdsourced participants who own a head-mounted display (HMD), which we call crowdXR. To investigate this problem...

In this investigation, we examine the contribution of intrinsic content density (ICD) to measures of expository text processing. In Studies 1 and 2, the factor structure of select text density metrics was examined and refined using two text samples (Ns = 150) randomly selected from an expository text corpus. Scores on the ICD measure based on the e...

The present longitudinal study investigated the effects of early childhood socioeconomic status on language-related resting-state functional connectivity and reading outcome in adolescence. Seventy-nine children participated in this study. Socioeconomic status was measured via parent questionnaire measuring parental education and family income at 1...

The role of visual skills in reading acquisition has long been debated and whether there is shared neurobiological basis between visual skills and reading is not clear. This study investigated the relationship between Visual Matching and reading and their shared neuroanatomical basis. Two hundred and ninety-three typically developing Mandarin-speak...

The perception of acoustic and phonological information in lexical tones is crucial for understanding Chinese words correctly. Research in the past has considered the linguistic functions of both acoustic and phonological information. However, it has been debated whether Chinese lexical tones are processed in the right or the left hemisphere, and w...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Learning the acoustic and phonological information in lexical tones is significant for learners of tonal languages. Although there is a wealth of knowledge from studies of second language (L2) tone learning, it remains unclear how L2 learners process acoustic versus phonological information differently depending on whether their first language (L1)...

How do students gain scientific knowledge while reading expository text? This study examines the underlying neurocognitive basis of textual knowledge structure and individual readers’ cognitive differences and reading habits, including the influence of text and reader characteristics, on outcomes of scientific text comprehension. By combining fixat...

Few studies have examined the time course of second language (L2) induced neuroplasticity or how individual differences may be associated with brain changes. The current longitudinal structural magnetic resonance imaging study examined changes in cortical thickness (CT) and gray matter volume (GMV) across two semesters of L2 Spanish classroom learn...

The language history questionnaire (LHQ) is an important tool for assessing the linguistic background and language proficiency of multilinguals or second language learners. Previously we developed a generic LHQ based on the most commonly asked questions in published studies (Li, Sepanski & Zhao, 2006) and provided a web-based interface (LHQ 2.0) th...

This chapter provides a review of both the bilingual cognitive models and the neural evidence in support of these models. The interactive activation in the bilingual interactive activation (BIA) model is affected by the reader's proficiency in the language and the current state of language activation. The inhibitory control (IC) model explicitly in...

Learning a second language (L2) presents a significant challenge to many people in adulthood. Platforms for effective L2 instruction have been developed in both academia and the industry. While real-life (RL) immersion is often lauded as a particularly effective L2 learning platform, little is known about the features of immersive contexts that con...

Although monolingual models of the neurocognition of language continue to dominate the field, in recent years a surge of interest in bilingualism or multilingualism has brought new evidence to our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms of language representation and processing. A large number of questions have been asked in the past from a...

Recent research indicates that learning a second language (L2) results in both functional and structural brain changes. However, few studies have examined whether structural brain changes vary as a function of the context in which L2 learning takes place. The current study examines changes in cortical thickness (CT) and gray matter volume (GMV) in...

Recent research indicates that learning a second language (L2) results in both functional and structural brain changes. However, few studies have examined whether structural brain changes vary as a function of the context in which L2 learning takes place. The current study examines changes in cortical thickness (CT) and gray matter volume (GMV) in...

The current study examined the relations among key variables that underlie reading comprehension of expository science texts in a diverse population of adult native English readers. Using Mechanical Turk to sample a range of adult readers, the study also examined the effect of text presentation on readers’ comprehension and knowledge structure esta...

Background: Verbal fluency is a measure of cognitive flexibility and word search strategies that is widely used to characterize impaired cognitive function. Despite the wealth of research on identifying and characterizing distinct aspects of verbal fluency, the anatomic and functional substrates of retrieval-related search and post-retrieval contro...

In this article we report a computational semantic analysis of the presidential candidates’ speeches in the two major political parties in the USA. In Study One, we modeled the political semantic spaces as a function of party, candidate, and time of election, and findings revealed patterns of differences in the semantic representation of key politi...

The ability to create temporary binding representations of information from different sources in working memory has recently been found to relate to the development of monolingual word recognition in children. The current study explored this possible relationship in an adult word-learning context. We assessed whether the relationship between cross-...

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...

Previous studies on the processing of lexical tones have typically confounded effects due to phonological information (different meanings of words signalled by syllables with different tonal categories) with effects due to specific acoustic information (pitch type: pitch height/pitch contour). The present study is designed to dissociate these two k...

Language learning occurring in authentic contexts has been shown to be more effective. Virtual worlds provide simulated contexts that have the necessary elements of authentic contexts for language learning, and as a result, many studies have adopted virtual worlds as a useful platform for language learning. However, few studies so far have examined...

Language learning occurring in authentic contexts has been shown to be more effective. Virtual worlds provide simulated contexts that have the necessary elements of authentic contexts for language learning, and as a result, many studies have adopted virtual worlds as a useful platform for language learning. However, few studies so far have examined...

When reading a narrative text, both the dorsal and ventral visual systems are activated. To illustrate the patterns of interactions between the dorsal and ventral visual systems in text reading, we conducted analyses of functional connectivity (FC) and effective connectivity (EC) in a left-hemispheric network for reading-driven functional magnetic...

There has been a recent boom in research relating semantic space computational models to fMRI data, in an effort to better understand how the brain represents semantic information. In the first study reported here, we expanded on a previous study to examine how different semantic space models and modeling parameters affect the abilities of these co...

A recent movement in cognitive neuroscience is the study of brain networks through functional and effective connectivity. The brain networks approach has already found its influences in the study of the neurobiology of language, but has yet to impact research in the neurocognition of bilingualism and second language. In this article, we briefly rev...

Successful knowledge acquisition requires a cognitive system that is both sensitive to statistical information and able to distinguish among multiple structures (i.e., to detect pattern shifts and form distinct representations). Extensive behavioral evidence has highlighted the importance of cues to structural change, demonstrating how, without the...

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...

Patterns of object naming often differ between languages, but bilingual speakers develop convergent naming patterns in their two languages that are distinct from those of monolingual speakers of each language. This convergence appears to reflect interactions between lexical representations for the two languages. In this study, we developed a self-o...

In an increasingly multilingual world, it is important to examine methods that may lead to more efficient second language learning, as well as to analyze the mechanisms by which successful learning occurs. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how different learning contexts can impact the learning of Mandarin Chinese as a second lang...

Patterns of object naming often differ between languages, but bilingual speakers develop convergent naming patterns in their two languages that are distinct from those of monolingual speakers of each language. This convergence appears to reflect dynamic interactions between lexical representations for the two languages. In this study, we present a...

Aims and objectives We examined the bi-directional interaction of first language (L1) and second language (L2) word use patterns by asking whether L2 patterns of word use can be acquired with intensive exposure in a laboratory setting, and whether this early stage of L2 learning would impact L1 performance. Methodology In two experiments, native s...

In this paper we report a longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that tested contrasting predictions about the time course of cognitive control in second language (L2) acquisition. We examined the neural correlates of lexical processing in L2 learners twice over the course of one academic year. Specifically, while in the sc...

In a typical cognitive experiment, you may be shown an image of a dog and asked to name it. As a monolingual, you have several options: “dog” “poodle” “canine”, and so on. As a bilingual, however, your options are doubled. Consequently, how bilinguals select and utter the correct word for a particular object has been carefully studied in psycholing...

Recent research in cognitive effects of bilingualism has generated both excitement and controversy. The current paper provides an overview of this literature that has taken a componential approach toward cognitive effects of bilingualism, according to which bilingual advantages in executive functions are measured in terms of executive control (inhi...

In recent years bilingualism has been linked to both advantages in executive control and positive impacts on aging. Such positive cognitive effects of bilingualism have been attributed to the increased need for language control during bilingual processing and increased cognitive reserve, respectively. However, a mechanistic explanation of how bilin...

Second language learners face a dual challenge in vocabulary learning: First, they must learn new names for the 100s of common objects that they encounter every day. Second, after some time, they discover that these names do not generalize according to the same rules used in their first language. Lexical categories frequently differ between languag...

The accurate perception of lexical tones in tonal languages involves the processing of both acoustic information and phonological information carried by the tonal signal. In this study we evaluated the relative role of the two types of information in native Chinese speaker’s processing of tones at a preattentive stage with event-related potentials...

The brain has an extraordinary ability to functionally and physically change or reconfigure its structure in response to environmental stimulus, cognitive demand, or behavioral experience. This property, known as neuroplasticity, has been examined extensively in many domains. But how does neuroplasticity occur in the brain as a function of an indiv...

ABSTRACT In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type...

A great deal of research has examined behavioral performance changes associated with second language learning. But what changes are taking place in the brain as learning progresses? How can we identify differences in brain changes that reflect successes of learning? To answer these questions, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fM...

Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed distinct functional roles of left and right temporal lobe structures in the processing of lexical tones in Chinese. In the present study, we ask whether knowledge of a second language (English) modulates this pattern of activation in the perception of tonal contrasts. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers wer...

As a globalized village, we have more bilingual than monolingual speakers today in the world (Grosjean and Li 2013, Chap. 1). © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014. All rights are reserved.

Connectionist models have had a profound impact on theories of language. While most early models were inspired by the classic parallel distributed processing architecture, recent models of language have explored various other types of models, including self-organizing models for language acquisition. In this paper, we aim at providing a review of t...

This fMRI study explores how nonlinguistic cues modulate lexical activation in the bilingual brain. We examined the influence of face race on bilingual language production in a picture-naming paradigm. Chinese-English bilinguals were presented with pictures of objects and images of faces (Asian or Caucasian). Participants named the picture in their...

Current connectionist models of bilingual language processing have been largely restricted to localist stationary models. To fully capture the dynamics of bilingual processing, we present SOMBIP, a self-organizing model of bilingual processing that has learning characteristics. SOMBIP consists of two interconnected self-organizing neural networks,...

Languages differ in the way they package elements of the world into words, which poses a challenge for bilinguals. We examined word use patterns for common household objects for late-immersed Chinese-English bilinguals to investigate how the bilingual lexical network develops when the first language is fully mature at the time of second-language im...

The language history questionnaire (LHQ) is an important tool for assessing the linguistic background of bilinguals or second language learners and for generating self-reported proficiency in multiple languages. Previously we developed a generic LHQ based on the most commonly asked questions in published studies (Li, Sepanski & Zhao, 2006). Here we...

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals’ two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we implement...

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...

PURPOSE Purpose:MTL is known to be involved in declarative memory. In particular, the hippocampus plays a crucial role in forming associations, but other surrounding cortical regions, is controversial. We used fMRI to measure brain activity during learning and recognition of novel face-name pairs to investigate the role of the hippocampus and the n...

Are explicit versus implicit learning mechanisms reflected in the brain as distinct neural structures, as previous research indicates, or are they distinguished by brain networks that involve overlapping systems with differential connectivity? In this functional MRI study we examined the neural correlates of explicit and implicit learning of artifi...

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...

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...

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of English and other Western languages suggest that basic lexical categories such as nouns and verbs are represented in different brain circuits. By contrast, research from Chinese indicates overlapping brain regions for nouns and verbs. How does a bilingual brain support the representation and organizati...

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...