Introduction

Language is the fundamental aspect of everyday life without which exchange of information between people, accumulation of knowledge through generations would not be possible. Yet, we know very little about how language is implemented in the brain. The central goal of this project is to understand such biological bases of language via observations of brain activities by studying brain waves using electroencephalograph (EEG) techniques.

Objectives

We design our EEG experiments with the following objectives:

1. •To investigate the neuropsychological bases of language processing
   

2. •To study the influence of language on the brain
   

3. •To discover the temporal and spatial sources of brain activities with different brain imaging techniques

Principal Investigator:

Research Team Members:

Prof. William S-Y. Wang

Dr. James W. Minett,

Lan Shuai,

Francis C. K. Wong,

Hong-Ying Zheng

We anticipate that this project will shed light on the neuroscience of human language, particularly of Chinese, as current studies being done in most other laboratories are based, in general, on European languages. Toward this goal, we will focus on the distinctive features of Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese, such as its use of a morphosyllabic writing system, the large degree of ambiguity, and the use of voice pitch to distinguish lexical meanings.

We are currently conducting experiments in both the visual and the auditory modality. For the former, we examine how the brain works to decode words into meanings. For the latter, we investigate the brain processes involved during the perception of speech, in particular the perception of Chinese lexical tones.

Our EEG system is recording brain waves of a participant.

Research team in the Language Engineering Laboratory