On November 22, 2019, Professor Zhongmin Chen from the Chinese Department of Fudan University was invited to give two academic lectures, entitled "On the Interaction Mechanism of Speech Pronunciation and Perception" and "Speech Perception and Motor Theory of Speech Perception". Dr. Lu Yi, the center's researcher, chaired the lectures, and each lecture attracted more than 50 teachers and students both from inside and outside the school.
During the lecture, Professor Chen fully demonstrated the extent to which the current phonetic research has developed, especially how to combine phonetics, brain science, psychology, anatomy, physiology, acoustics and other related disciplines to form a comprehensive and cross-cutting phonetics. Among them, the first lecture focused on the physiological mechanisms of the human vocal and auditory organs. Through the ingenious complementation, these two organs cooperate with each other, and use the physiological characteristics of human beings to successfully complete verbal communication under the redundant yet efficient, complex yet simple internal laws. Mainly from the perspective of brain science, the second lecture centered on the research results of brain science since the 21st century which served as new experiments to support the existing motor theory (MT) proposed in the 1950s. It explained how humans separate a limited number of speech categories from a continuous stream of speech and overcome the endless phonetic signals in the physical form to ultimately decode speech information. After the two lectures, the teachers and students at the site interacted with Professor Chen for about half an hour and fully exchanged their academic opinions.
After the lecture, Professor Zhongmin Chen, accompanied by Dr. Ji Lu and Dr. Qun Yang, visited the Speech Lab and exchanged of experimental techniques on equipment such as polysomnography, electronic glottis, dynamic position instruments, and air pressure instruments.
