2021.10.27 Dr. HUANG Hsu-Wen

Assistant Professor

Department of Linguistics and Translation

City University of Hong Kong

Profile

Hemispheric asymmetry, ageing, and language comprehension: global concepts, local contexts

To successfully comprehend a message, information acquired through different sensory modalities must be rapidly combined and integrated with long-term knowledge. Although theories of language comprehension often assume that language comprehension arises along a single processing stream, leading to a single meaning representation for an utterance or text, there is an emerging understanding that comprehension arises along multiple, parallel processing streams in which the two cerebral hemispheres play complementary roles. Normal aging is accompanied by changes in both structural and functional cerebral organization. Although verbal knowledge seems to be relatively stable across the lifespan, there are age-related changes in the rapid use of that knowledge during on-line language processing. In this talk I will address how aging affects effectiveness of preparing upcoming words and building an integrated sentence-level representation. I will also share several research works discussing the impacts of linguistic properties on sensory and number processing.