On December 2, 2022, at the invitation of CCSL, Professor Floris de Lange, the chief researcher of brain, cognition and behavior at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, made a wonderful academic report online for the teachers and students of our university. The report was titled "Prediction in Language Comprehension". This presentation is the fourth lecture of the Fourth Language Acquisition, Cognitive and Brain Sciences Forum (IV). The report was hosted by Dr. He Tao, a full-time researcher of CCSL, and attended by more than 200 participants.
in his presentation, Professor Floris de Lange focuses on the neural mechanisms of predictions in speech comprehension and processing. He discusses two research questions: the predictions in reading: single words "and" prediction during language listening ". Specifically, anticipation is critical to the recognition of individual letters in a word. Using fMRI technology, hierarchical neural network model, multivariate pattern recognition and other methods, Professor de Lange demonstrated for the first time at the neural level that word background can improve the neural representation of letters in the primary visual cortex. Based on the research results at the word level, Professor de Lange extended the research on the anticipatory mechanism to the discourse level, revealing that the promotive mechanism of anticipatory mechanism exists at all levels in the natural speech processing of human brain, including syllables, words, grammar and syntax, and that the high-level anticipatory mechanism plays an important role in regulating the low-level anticipatory.
