香港中文大学语言处理实验室心理语言学线上论坛

讲座一

Speaker: Karl David Neergaard

Title: The architecture of the Mandarin phonological mental lexicon

Time: 15:00 – 16:30 pm, 17 November 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker 

Karl is currently a Sara Borrell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Valdecilla Biomedical Innovation and Research Institute in Santander, Spain. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Macau, Department of English, prior to postdoctoral work at Aix-Marseille University at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage. He graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2018 with a PhD in Linguistics. His research combines computational methods with psycholinguistic experimentation to address questions concerning the complexity of the mental lexicon.  

His current research interests incorporate language processing tasks with facial and bodily movement with the purpose of understanding the underlying socio-emotive nature of the lexicon and their implications to neuropsychological disorders, such as schizophrenia, and healthy and disordered development. 

The architecture of the Mandarin phonological mental lexicon 

Karl David Neergaard 

Valdecilla Biomedical Innovation and Research Institute,  

Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital 

In this talk, I review the results of experiments that investigated the structural aspects of the Mandarin phonological mental lexicon and how they specifically relate to the question of syllable segmentation. This body of work was done under the premise that the network of coactivated form-similar items during perception and production mirror the schematic aspects of units within the metrical/representational frame of speech production and perception models. Lexical access viewed under this lens entails a lexicon of multiple concurrent networks that when activated due to the demands of a specific task, establishes those connections within the lexicon best fit for the goals of the task. From this perspective, segmentation of phonological information does not follow a production/perception dichotomy as currently implied in the literature using priming paradigms and picture-word matching tasks. Instead, activation patterns spread across words over time to form a schematic representation based on their shared characteristics.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: 

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)

讲座二

Speaker: Siddharth Ramanan

Title: Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory dysfunction: insights from neurodegenerative syndromes

Time: 16:00 – 17:30 pm, 1 December 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory dysfunction: insights from neurodegenerative syndromes

Siddharth Ramanan, PhD

MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Units, University of Cambridge, UK

A distributed brain network supports our ability to remember past events. The parietal cortex is a critical member of this network, yet, its exact contributions to episodic remembering remain unclear. Neurodegenerative syndromes affecting the posterior neocortex offer a unique opportunity to understand the importance and role of parietal regions to episodic memory. In this talk, I introduce and explore the rare neurodegenerative syndrome of Logopenic Progressive Aphasia (LPA), an aphasic variant of Alzheimer’s disease presenting with early, left-lateralized temporoparietal atrophy amidst relatively spared hippocampal integrity. I then discuss two key studies from my recent work showcasing pervasive episodic and autobiographical memory dysfunction in LPA, to a level comparable to typical, amnesic Alzheimer’s disease. Using multimodal neuroimaging, I demonstrate how degeneration of the angular gyrus in the left inferior parietal lobule, and its structural connections to the hippocampus, contribute to amnesic profiles in this syndrome. I finally evaluate these findings in the context of memory profiles in other posterior cortical neurodegenerative syndromes as well as recent theoretical models underscoring the importance of the parietal cortex in the integration and representation of episodic contextual information.

About the Speaker

Dr Ramanan is a neuropsychologist investigating the neural contributors of heterogeneous cognitive and behavioural symptoms in neurodegenerative dementia syndromes. He completed his PhD in 2020 from The University of Sydney, Australia where he worked with Profs. Muireann Irish and Olivier Piguet at Frontier, a world-leading young-onset dementia research team. His work mainly focused on decomposing episodic memory and associated structural brain correlates in traditionally non-amnesic neurodegenerative disorders.

He moved to Cambridge to work with Prof. Matthew A. Lambon Ralph. He expands his research by adopting data-driven, transdiagnostic approaches to chart neurocomputational processes in the brain and to uncover new cognitive roles of brain regions. He has been awarded the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) Post-Doctoral Research Award, a distinction that recognizes the best research to be presented at the future INS Annual Meeting.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum:

https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html

本文来源：港中文语言处理实验室

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