Xiaoming Jiang

Shanghai International Studies University · Institute of Linguistics

Our voice provides salient cues about how confident we sound, which promotes inferences about how believable we are. However, the neural mechanisms involved in these social inferences are largely unknown. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the brain networks and individual differences underlying the evaluation of speaker b...

Feeling of knowing (or expressed confidence) reflects a speaker's certainty or commitment to a statement and can be associated with one's trustworthiness or persuasiveness in social interaction. We investigated the perceptual-acoustic correlates of expressed confidence and doubt in spoken language, with a focus on both linguistic and vocal speech c...

Listeners often encounter conflicting verbal and vocal cues about the speaker's feeling of knowing; these "mixed messages" can reflect online shifts in one's mental state as they utter a statement, or serve different social-pragmatic goals of the speaker. Using a cross-splicing paradigm, we investigated how conflicting cues about a speaker's feelin...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

Adult language learners show distinct abilities in acquiring a new language, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain elusive. Previous studies suggested that resting-state brain connectome may contribute to individual differences in learning ability. Here, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) in a large cohort of 106 healthy young adults (5...

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...

During vocal emotion communication, it is important to continuously monitor, analyze, and update information from multiple sources (e.g., verbal and vocal channels) to build up social impressions and utterance representations. To examine the temporal dynamics and the underlying neurocognitive process associated with vocal emotional processing, elec...

Previous studies have reported the “emotional congruency effect (ECE)” in cross-modal emotion processing, claiming that multimodal congruent emotional signals will enhance the emotion processing, yet few studies have shown how this effect is dynamically processed over time and whether it is achieved in the same way across language and cultural back...

Presupposition refers to the non-explicit assumption or belief held by both the listener and the speaker (the “common ground”). When encountering a presupposition message, the listener is required to infer what the speaker implies from the specific linguistic marker (or presupposition trigger) and its constrained object (or computational point). Fo...

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

Functional somatic symptoms (FSS) are typically associated with excessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors related to the physical symptoms whether these symptoms are unequivocally associated with a diagnosed medical condition. However, less evidence is available concerning the neurocognitive deficits underlying these features of FSS. This study ai...

Humans are unique in their ability to parse hierarchical structures of sentences. Previous studies demonstrated that syntactic processes at different hierarchies are subserved by distinct subregions in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), in which BA45 is mainly involved in processing lower-level syntactic structures and BA44 is mainly involved in p...

When we hear an emotional voice, does this alter how the brain perceives and evaluates a subsequent face? Here, we tested this question by comparing event-related potentials evoked by angry, sad, and happy faces following vocal expressions which varied in form (speech-embedded emotions, non-linguistic vocalizations) and emotional relationship (cong...

Becoming multilingual has a broad impact on cognitive abilities, especially visual processing. An important theoretical issue is whether the acquisition of distinct script systems affects face processing in an identical way, or, if not, how this acquisition may exert differential impacts on face processing. By reviewing the existing literature, we...

Communicative expression is a cross-species phenomenon. We investigated the perceptual attributes of social expressions encoded in human-like animal stickers commonly used as nonverbal communicative tools on social media (e.g. WeChat). One hundred and twenty animal stickers which varied in 12 categories of social expressions (serving pragmatic or e...

Information in the tone of voice alters social impressions of a speaker and underlying brain activity as listeners evaluate the interpersonal relevance of an utterance. Here, we presented basic requests that expressed politeness distinctions through the speaker’s voice (polite/rude) and the use of explicit linguistic markers (half of the requests b...

Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual’s cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants’ gazes at emotional faces in a modified visual search task. We...

In social interactions, speakers often use their tone of voice (“prosody”) to communicate their interpersonal stance to pragmatically mark an ironic intention (e.g., sarcasm). The neurocognitive effects of prosody as listeners process ironic statements in real time are still poorly understood. In this study, 30 participants judged the friendliness...

In Chinese, the compound reflexive ta-ziji (“him/her-self”) has the gender marking pronoun ta, hence presenting a good test case for interference effects from structurally illicit antecedents predicted by cue-based retrieval models. Using reading eye-tracking, we manipulated the gender of ta-ziji that (mis)matches that of matrix- and local-subject....

Speakers modulate their voice (prosody) to communicate non-literal meanings, such as sexual innuendo (She inspected his package this morning, where “package” could refer to a man’s penis). Here, we analyzed event-related potentials to illuminate how listeners use prosody to interpret sexual innuendo and what neurocognitive processes are involved. P...

The way that speakers communicate their stance towards the listener is often vital for understanding the interpersonal relevance of speech acts, such as basic requests. To establish how interpersonal dimensions of an utterance affect neurocognitive processing, we compared event-related potentials elicited by requests that linguistically varied in h...

During comprehension of a hierarchical structure, semantic integration between sequential, mismatched sentential constituents does not proceed when the later word in the sequence (e.g., the noun in the verb + classifier + noun) can be assigned an alternative role in the sentence (e.g., as a modifier of a subsequent object noun) (Zhang et al., 2011)...

Our decision to believe what another person says can be influenced by vocally expressed confidence in speech and by whether the speaker-listener are members of the same social group. The dynamic effects of these two information sources on neurocognitive processes that promote believability impressions from vocal cues are unclear. Here, English Cana...

A classification approach combining machine learning and representational similarity analysis was performed on neurophysiological data (i.e., electrophysiological responses) to distinguish speakers of different stances. The trial-based classification based on a single subject data revealed temporo-spatial neural representations that most accurately...

An ERP study demonstrated that construction-based pragmatic constraints in Chinese (e.g., lian…dou that constrains a low-likelihood event and is similar to even in English) can rapidly influence sentence comprehension and the mismatch of such constraints would lead to increased neural activity on the mismatching word. Here we examine to what extent...

The way we speak allows communicating subtle pragmatic distinctions and social meanings. We know that listeners are sensitive to this information and tend to infer more general social impressions of individuals depending on the way they speak. However, the characteristics of the listeners (such as individual differences in social anxiety) can affec...

Results from cognitive neuroscience have been cited as evidence in courtrooms around the world, and their admissibility has been a challenge for the legal system. Unfortunately, the recent reproducibility crisis in cognitive neuroscience, showing that the published studies in cognitive neuroscience may not be as trustworthy as expected, has made th...

New research is exploring ways that prosody fulfils different social-pragmatic functions in spoken language by revealing the mental or affective state of the speaker, thereby contributing to an understanding of speaker’s meaning. Prosody is often pivotal in signaling speaker attitudes or stance in the interpersonal context of the speaker-hearer; in...

The indirect nature of sarcasm renders it challenging to interpret: the actual speaker’s intent can only be retrieved when the incongruence between the content and pragmatic cues, such as context or tone of voice, is recognized. The cognitive processes underlying the interpretation of irony and sarcasm, in particular, the effects of contextual inco...

Until recently, research on im/politeness has primarily focused on the role of linguistic strategies while neglecting the contributions of prosody and acoustic cues for communicating politeness. Here, we analyzed a large set of recordings — verbal requests spoken in a direct manner (Lend me a nickel), preceded by the word “Please” or in a conventio...

Communication involves successfully deriving a speaker's meaning beyond the literal expression. Using fMRI, it was investigated how the listener's brain realizes distinctions between enrichment-based meanings and literal semantic meanings. The neural patterns of the Mandarin scalar quantifier you-de (similar to some in English) which implies the me...

Contextual relevance, which is vital for understanding conversational implicatures (CI), engages both the frontal-temporal language and theory-of-mind networks. Here we investigate how contextual relevance affects CI processing and regulates the connectivity between CI-processing-related brain regions. Participants listened to dialogues in which th...

Conventional wet electrodes require skin preparation and gel usage to maintain low interface impedance, which limit their applications in long-term monitoring of biopotentials such as electroencephalogram (EEG). To address this problem, microneedle electrode arrays (MNEAs) have been employed as dry electrodes, which could be capable of EEG monitori...

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a spea...

Using a gating paradigm, this study investigated the nature of the in-group advantage in vocal emotion recognition by comparing 2 distinct cultures. Pseudoutterances conveying 4 basic emotions, expressed in English and Hindi, were presented to English and Hindi listeners. In addition to hearing full utterances, each stimulus was gated from its onse...

Using a gating paradigm, this study investigated the nature of the in-group advantage in vocal emotion recognition by comparing 2 distinct cultures. Pseudoutterances conveying 4 basic emotions, expressed in English and Hindi, were presented to English and Hindi listeners. In addition to hearing full utterances, each stimulus was gated from its onse...

A concessive construction like Grandma moved from Southern to Northern China although she likes the South, where the winter is warm implies a causal assumption that is based on one’s real world knowledge but is inconsistent with the asserted fact. This study investigated to what extent the processing of a concessive construction differs from the pr...

Being polite is an effective way to facilitate interpersonal communication. One of the key issues is how the human cognitive system perceives verbal politeness and deals with the cases in which politeness principles are violated. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aim to address the nature of real time processing of disrespectful referenc...

Previous studies have shown that brain regions for mentalizing, including temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), are activated in understanding the nonliteral meaning of sentences. A different set of brain regions, including left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), is activated for dealing with pragmatic incongruence. Here we...

This study aims to investigate the perceptual-acoustic correlates of vocal confidence. Statements with different communicative functions (e.g., stating facts, making judgments) were spoken in confident, close-to-confident, unconfident and neutral voices. Statements with preceding linguistic cues (e.g. I'm positive, Most likely, Maybe, etc.) or no l...

Previous studies have shown that brain regions for mentalizing, including temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), are activated in understanding the nonliteral meaning of sentences. A different set of brain regions, including left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), is activated for dealing with pragmatic incongruence. Here we...

a b s t r a c t A linguistic construction is typically viewed as encoding the pairing of syntactic form and semantic information that is independent of the meaning of constituent words. Here with the event-related potentials (ERPs) we demonstrate that such a construction can also encode pragmatic constraints (event likelihood) that immediately infl...

The present study examines the brain-level representation and composition of meaning in scalar quantifiers (e.g., some), which have both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). We adopted a picture-sentence verification design to examine event-related potential (ERP) effects of reading infelicitous quantifiers for which...

Making a trust decision in interpersonal relationship involves forming positive expectation toward the decision outcome. Previous studies have suggested that trust and distrust are qualitatively distinct and have differential neurocognitive substrates. In this study, we investigated how trust choice would modulate brain responses to decision outcom...

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject noun+verb+numeral+c...

A recent ERP study on Chinese demonstrated dissociable neural responses to semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy (Zhou et al., 2010). However, it is unclear whether such findings are restricted to a non-case marked language that relies heavily on word order and semantic information for the construction of sentenc...

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, subject noun+verb+numeral+classifier+object noun, the object noun is constrained by selectional restrictions of th...

This study investigates the temporal neural dynamics of processing the Chinese universal quantifier dou during Chinese sentence comprehension using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Universal quantifier violations were created when the universal quantifier dou (all, every) was misplaced either after a singular object noun phrase (NP) in...

The event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the neural dynamics in processing different levels of the hierarchical syntactic structure during comprehension of Chinese sentences with the ba construction. In these sentences, the structural auxiliaries, which mark either the adjective (-de) or the adverb (-di) category, were em...