Séminaire de
Shelley Xiuli Tong
Speech, Language, and Reading Lab, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
On the Primacy of Prosody: Perception, Production, and Their Connections with Reading Comprehension Across Languages
Jeudi 12 juin 2025 de 10h à 11h, en salle de conférences B011 au LPL, Aix-en-Provence
Suivi d’une table ronde (11h-12h) avec la participation de Cristel Portes et Chotiga Pattamadilok du LPL.
Résumé du séminaire :
When reading stories to children, adults often employ prosodic reading, using animated and expressive tones to act out the characters. This technique is not only entertaining, but plays a crucial role in enhancing comprehension. In this talk, I will discuss the findings from a decade of research conducted by my lab on speech prosody and its impacts on reading comprehension by addressing three questions. First, what are the acoustic-phonetic and lexical factors influencing linguistic pitch perception across languages? Second, how does prosodic sensitivity, or perceptual acuity to acoustic–phonetic cues associated with prosodic structure, contribute to reading comprehension? And third, to what extent does prosodic reading, characterized by pitch and pause patterns when reading aloud a connected text, predict reading comprehension? The answers to these questions support a new theoretical framework, the prosodic catalyzing hypothesis (Tong et al., 2024), which suggests that prosodic reading integrates lexical, syntactic and semantic representations of texts to facilitate comprehension.
Evènement ouvert à tout le monde.
Bio de S. X. Tong :
Shelley Xiuli Tong, Ph.D., is a Full Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education where she directs the Speech, Language, and Reading Lab. Recognized as an RGC Research Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, her research, which has been funded by the U.S. National Academy of Education, the UK ESRC- HK RGC joint grant scheme and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, focuses on utilizing cognitive-behavioural, neurophysiological, and machine learning approaches to investigate the roles of prosodic reading in bilingual reading comprehension difficulties; the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying statistical learning in children with dyslexia; and optimal solutions for classifying dyslexia, autism, and hearing-impairment. She has developed an intelligent dyslexic interface design (I-DID) that capitalizes on individual strengths of children with dyslexia and reflects her life-long commitment to transform scientific evidence into public policy and practice. Her work has resulted in over 80 publications in journals such as Child Development, Cognition, Neuroimage, Autism Research, Journal of Educational Psychology, Learning and Instruction, and Educational Psychology Review. She was an Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistic and currently serves as an Associate Editor for Scientific Studies of Reading.
