Weijun Li - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Weijun Li

The present study aimed to explore the acoustic features of modern style poems. One hundred quatr... more The present study aimed to explore the acoustic features of modern style poems. One hundred quatrains composed of five or seven Chinese characters in each sentence were read aloud by a male speaker, and then the acoustic analysis was performed from three facets: pitch, duration and intensity. There are generally three prosodic hierarchical

The present paper review the use of prosodic information in disambiguating syntactic structure in... more The present paper review the use of prosodic information in disambiguating syntactic structure in recent years. Firstly, this article introduces the prosodic properties and its function; secondly, it discusses the syntactic ambiguity and its models. Thirdly, two problems are analyzed from the point of view of speaker and listener: whether naïve speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities in the natural context, and whether listeners use on-line prosodic information to inform initial syntactic parsing decisions.

Prosodic boundaries, as a vital part of the prosodic features in spoken language, are very import... more Prosodic boundaries, as a vital part of the prosodic features in spoken language, are very important in sentence and discourse comprehension. Recently, researchers have shown increasing interest in the neural mechanism of prosodic boundary processing. Numerous studies have found that closure positive shift, a special ERP component reflecting the closure of a phonological phrase, could be induced by a phonological phrase boundary embedded in a sentence.

The current study aimed at investigating the processing of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Ma... more The current study aimed at investigating the processing of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Mandarin Chinese sentences using electroencephalography, mainly focused on the following questions: (1) whether prosodic boundaries at different levels could evoke the closure positive shift reflecting prosodic boundary perception;

A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in language has recently been identified as a r... more A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in language has recently been identified as a reliable and replicable brain effect. It is called the closure positive shift (CPS) and has an equivalent in the perception of music (music CPS). Nevertheless, either in language or in music, this component is elicited by phrase boundary embedded in sentence or melody. Poetry, as the interlude of language and music, is a special kind of discourse and promising material to explore prosodic boundary processing beyond sentence level. The aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive processing of hierarchical prosodic boundaries in Chinese Tang poem using rhythm matching task. There are generally four hierarchical levels in each poem, including foot boundary, phonological phrase boundary, intonational phrase boundary, and couplet boundary. The electrophysiological results indicated that all the prosodic boundaries of different levels in poems could give rise to the CPS reflecting prosodic phrasing. Furthermore, as the prosodic hierarchical level became higher, the onset latency of the CPS got longer, suggesting the influence of retrospective processing of former information. With regard to the amplitude, we analyzed the CPS amplitude in every 100 ms time window. It was showed that phonological phrase boundary elicited higher CPS amplitude as compared to that evoked by couplet boundary in an earlier time window, whereas in a later time window both of them were lower than the CPS correlated to intonational phrase boundary. The present results further shape our understanding of the CPS component and its relation to the processes involved in prosodic phrasing.

The presence of an intonational phrase boundary is often marked by three major acoustic cues: pau... more The presence of an intonational phrase boundary is often marked by three major acoustic cues: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset. The present study investigates how these three acoustic cues are weighted in the perception of intonational phrase boundaries in two experiments. Sentences that contained two intonational phrases with a critical boundary between them were used as the experimental stimuli. The roles of the three acoustic cues at the critical boundary were manipulated in five conditions. The first condition featured none of the acoustic cues. The following three conditions featured only one cue each: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset, respectively. The fifth condition featured both pause duration and pre-final lengthening. A baseline condition was also included in which all three acoustic cues were preserved intact. Listeners were asked to detect the presence of the critical boundaries in Experiment 1 and judge the strength of the critical boundaries in Experiment 2. The results of both experiments showed that listeners used all three acoustic cues in the perception of prosodic boundaries. More importantly, these acoustic cues were weighted differently across the two experiments: Pause was a more powerful perceptual cue than both final lengthening and pitch reset, with the latter two cues perceptually equivalent; the effect of pause and the effects of the other two acoustic cues were not additive. These results suggest that the weighting of acoustic cues contributes significantly to the perceptual differences of intonational phrase boundary.

We investigated the influence of typographical errors (typos) on eye movements and word recogniti... more We investigated the influence of typographical errors (typos) on eye movements and word recognition in Chinese reading. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they read sentences in which the target words were presented (1) normally, (2) with the initial stroke of the first characters removed (the omitted stroke condition) or (3) the first characters replaced by anomalous characters (the anomalous character condition). The results indicated that anomalous characters caused longer fixation durations and shorter outgoing forward saccade lengths than the correct words. This finding is consistent with the prediction of the theory of the processing-based strategy. Additionally, anomalous characters strongly disrupted lexical processing and whole sentence comprehension, but small stroke omissions did not. Implications of the effect of processing difficulty on forward saccade targeting for models of eye movement control during Chinese reading are discussed.

We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers' spontaneous word segmentatio... more We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers' spontaneous word segmentation processing is consistent with the national standard rules of word segmentation based on the Contemporary Chinese language word segmentation specification for information processing (CCLWSSIP). Participants were asked to segment Chinese sentences into individual words according to their prior knowledge of words. The results showed that Chinese readers did not follow the segmentation rules of the CCLWSSIP, and their word segmentation processing was influenced by the syntactic categories of consecutive words. In many cases, the participants did not consider the auxiliary words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs, numerals and quantifiers as single word units. Generally, Chinese readers tended to combine function words with content words to form single word units, indicating they were inclined to chunk single words into large information units during word segmentation. Additionally, the ''overextension of monosyllable words'' hypothesis was tested and it might need to be corrected to some degree, implying that word length have an implicit influence on Chinese readers' segmentation processing. Implications of these results for models of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed. Citation: Liu P-P, Li W-J, Lin N, Li X-S (2013) Do Chinese Readers Follow the National Standard Rules for Word Segmentation during Reading? PLoS ONE 8(2): e55440.

Spoken language is structured into phrases. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in this study i... more Spoken language is structured into phrases. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in this study investigating the perception of prosodic hierarchical boundaries. It was found that the closure positive shift (CPS) can be evoked by phonological phrase boundaries and intonational phrase boundaries respectively; the CPSs are different in onset and peak latency. The deflection elicited by prosodic word boundaries is more positive compared with the one elicited by syllable boundaries.

Classical Chinese poems have strict regulations on the acoustic pattern of each syllable and are ... more Classical Chinese poems have strict regulations on the acoustic pattern of each syllable and are semantically meaningless. Using such poems, this study characterized the temporal order of tone and vowel processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). The target syllable of the poem was either correct or deviated from the correct syllable at tone, vowel or both levels. Vowel violation elicited a negative effect between 300 and 500 ms regardless of the tone correctness, while tone violation elicited a positive effect between 600 and 1000 ms. The results suggest that the vowel information was available earlier than the tone information. Moreover, there was an interaction between the effect of vowel and tone violations between 600 and 1000 ms, showing that the vowel violation produced a positive effect only when the tone was correct. This indicates that vowel and tone processing interacts in the later processing stage, which involves both error detection and reanalysis of the spoken input. Implications of the present results for models of speech perception are discussed.