Speaker
Professor Niels O. Schiller
Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong

Niels O. Schiller is a Chair Professor of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics at City University of Hong Kong and Head of Department of Linguistics and Translation. After his undergraduate studies at Trier University in Germany, Schiller was awarded a scholarship from the
German Max Planck Society to carry out his PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in Psychology from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. In his PhD dissertation, Schiller investigated the role
of the syllable in lexical access during speech production. Following his PhD, he held research positions at Harvard University, Maastricht University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Schiller was appointed professor of psycholinguistics at Maastricht University, and subsequently he became professor of psycho- and neurolinguistics at Leiden University, before moving to Hong Kong. Schiller’s research interests include lexico-syntactic, morphological, and phonological encoding processes in mono- and multilingual language production.

Event Details
This talk will be about how we plan and produce speech. More specifically, how do we put together words and sentences and what are the linguistic units that need to be activated and retrieved from long-term memory. Words can consist of smaller meaningful elements called morphemes, e.g., the Cantonese compound 河馬 /ho4maa5/ (‘hippo’) consisting of ‘river’ and ‘horse’. How do we represent words like 河馬in our memory – as one holistic entity or do we also store the morphemes ‘river’ and ‘horse’ separately?
The present series of studies investigated morphological priming in Dutch and Mandarin as well as its time course and neural correlates in overt speech production using a long-lag priming paradigm. Behavioral (reaction time), event related potential (ERP) and neuroimaging (fMRI) data were collected in separate studies, investigating both mono- and multilingual participants.. I will report several different studies on compound production which show an extremely coherent picture and argue for a separate level of morphological processing in language production planning.

Registration Link/ Event Page
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Enquires

Tel : (852) 3943 1516
Fax : (852) 2603 7755
Email : lin@cuhk.edu.hk