心理语言学线上论坛 | 2022年9月14日15:00 Wen-Jui Kuo (郭文瑞) 教授讲座

Speaker: Wen-Jui Kuo

Title: Multi-scale neuroimaging on language tone processing

Time: 15:00 – 16:30, 14 Sept 2022 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

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

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

Talks on the forum can also be viewed live, using the below QR code: 

Multi-scale neuroimaging on language tone processing

Wen-Jui Kuo (郭文瑞)

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Language tone is a suprasegmental speech unit and functionally serves word meaning distinction. Understanding how tone processing proceeds in the brain is important because it can help resolve a paradox between linguistic pitch processing (i.e., tone) and non-linguistic pitch in the brain and link to research about how the brain develops to acquire a language. In this study, by taking advantage of the high spatiotemporal resolution of intracranial EEG data, i.e., the stereo-EEG (SEEG), and fMRI, we were allowed to profile the neural mechanism of language tone processing with high precision. Specifically, we expect that linguistic (tone) knowledge would modulate brain activation of the frontal and temporal language areas, i.e., earlier and larger activation for linguistic pitch (language tone judgment) than for non-linguistic pitch processing (voice gender discrimination).  

About the speaker

I am a professor at the Institute of Neuroscience. My current research interests include cognitive neuroscience of Chinese language processing and reading, cognitive neuroscience of decision, emotion and action control, and neuroimaging methods and design. In addition to utilizing non-invasive neuroimaging methods, such as fMRI, MEG, and EEG in my studies, I currently conduct auditory and speech-related studies using intracranial recordings in pre-surgical patients. The recorded intracranial EEG provides not only very high SNR electrophysiological signal (100 times of scalp EEG), but also information of very specific brain location. This approach significantly strengthens our capability to see how our brain works. We also design or customize cognitive tasks for patient’s examination. Especially for patients of epilepsy, we successfully establish a platform to simultaneously record EEG and fMRI to help locate epileptic networks, which provides crucial information for epileptic surgery planning.

Recent publications: 

1.Lee H-J, Cheng S-K, Lee C-Y, and *Kuo W-J. (2021). The neural basis of compound word processing revealed by varying semantic transparency and morphemic neighborhood size. Brain and Language, 221, 104985. 

2.Fa-Hsuan Lin , Hsin-Ju Lee , Jyrki Ahveninen , Iiro P. J¨a¨askel¨ainen , Hsiang-Yu Yu , Cheng-Chia Lee , Chien-Chen Chou , *Wen-Jui Kuo. Distributed source modeling of intracranial stereoelectro-encephalographic measurements, NeuroImage (2021), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117746.

3.Claire H. C. Chang, Stanislas Dehaene, Denise H. Wu, Wen-Jui Kuo, Christophe Pallier. 2020. Cortical encoding of linguistic constituent with and without morphosyntactic cues. Cortex (in press). 

4.Fa-Hsuan Lin, Yun-Fei Liu, Hsin-Ju Lee, Claire H. C. Chang, Iiro P. Jaaskelainen, Jyh-Neng Yeh, Wen-Jui Kuo. 2019. Differential brain mechanisms during reading human vs. machine translated fiction and news texts. Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 13; 9(1): 13251.  

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum:

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