Weiyi Ma
Biographic Data
| ID | 3838875 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Weiyi Ma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Weiyi |
| FAMILY NAME | Ma |
| SIGNATURE | MA W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arkansas at Fayetteville |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2299-9834 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The effect of virtual reality action games on attention functions: An EEG study
Openness to World Music Predicts Adaptation to a New Culture among Student Sojourners
Student sojourners temporarily live in a foreign country to pursue higher education. Research has shown that student sojourners’ openness to new experience and cultural values predict their adaptation to the host culture. However, it is unclear whether music – a major medium of cultural communication – also plays a role in adaptation to a host culture. This study examined whether student sojourners’ world music open-earedness (a willingness to ex…
The Influence of Exemplar Variability on Young Children’s Construal of Verb Meaning
Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a highly variable range of exemplars allows children to detect and abstract the commonalities across action…
Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment
Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds by relying on the same acoustic cues that signal emotionality in speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, …
The Role Classifiers Play in Selecting the Referent of a Word
An important cue to the meaning of a new noun is its accompanying classifier. For example, in English, X in "a sheet of X" should refer to a broad, flat object. A classifier is required in Chinese to quantify nouns. Using children's overt responses in an object/picture selection task, past research found reliable semantic knowledge of classifiers in Mandarin-reared children at around age three. However, it is unclear how children's semantic knowl…
Children’s decoding of emotional prosody in four languages
It is well established that adults can interpret emotional speech prosody independent of word meaning comprehension, even for emotional speech prosody in an unfamiliar language. However, the acquisition of this ability remains unclear. This study examined the decoding of four emotions (happy, sad, surprise, angry) conveyed with speech prosody in four languages (English, Chinese, French, Spanish) by American and Chinese children at 3 to 5 years of…
A deficit in using prosodic cues to understand communicative intentions by children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-tracking study
The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to use prosodic cues to understand others’ communicative intentions. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, the study found that unlike typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, both 4-year-olds with ASD and 5-year-olds with ASD exhibited an eye gaze pattern that reflected their inability to use prosodic cues to infer the…
Syntactic cues to the noun and verb distinction in Mandarin child-directed speech
The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word’s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ( a/ an/ the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word’s form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language tha…
Spontaneous emergence of language-like and music-like vocalizations from an artificial protolanguage
How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. Thisprotolanguageis thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizingreferentialfunctionality and music prioritizingemotionalfunctionality. However, there has never been an attempt…
Children's Use of Morphological Cues in Real-Time Event Representation
Word Learning in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech
Infant-directed speech (IDS), compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), is characterized by a slower rate, a higher fundamental frequency, greater pitch variations, longer pauses, repetitive intonational structures, and shorter sentences. Despite studies on the properties of IDS, there is no direct demonstration of its effects for word learning in infants. This study examined whether 21- and 27-month-old children learned novel words better in ID…
Imageability predicts the age of acquisition of verbs in Chinese children
Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tardif et al. , in press). Imageability ratings were a re…
Children's Use of Morphological Cues in Real-Time Event Representation
Spontaneous emergence of language-like and music-like vocalizations from an artificial protolanguage
How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. Thisprotolanguageis thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizingreferentialfunctionality and music prioritizingemotionalfunctionality. However, there has never been an attempt…
Imageability predicts the age of acquisition of verbs in Chinese children
Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tardif et al. , in press). Imageability ratings were a re…
Word Learning in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech
Infant-directed speech (IDS), compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), is characterized by a slower rate, a higher fundamental frequency, greater pitch variations, longer pauses, repetitive intonational structures, and shorter sentences. Despite studies on the properties of IDS, there is no direct demonstration of its effects for word learning in infants. This study examined whether 21- and 27-month-old children learned novel words better in ID…
Children's Use of Morphological Cues in Real-Time Event Representation
Syntactic cues to the noun and verb distinction in Mandarin child-directed speech
The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word’s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ( a/ an/ the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word’s form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language tha…
Spontaneous emergence of language-like and music-like vocalizations from an artificial protolanguage
How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. Thisprotolanguageis thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizingreferentialfunctionality and music prioritizingemotionalfunctionality. However, there has never been an attempt…
A deficit in using prosodic cues to understand communicative intentions by children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-tracking study
The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to use prosodic cues to understand others’ communicative intentions. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, the study found that unlike typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, both 4-year-olds with ASD and 5-year-olds with ASD exhibited an eye gaze pattern that reflected their inability to use prosodic cues to infer the…
Children’s decoding of emotional prosody in four languages
It is well established that adults can interpret emotional speech prosody independent of word meaning comprehension, even for emotional speech prosody in an unfamiliar language. However, the acquisition of this ability remains unclear. This study examined the decoding of four emotions (happy, sad, surprise, angry) conveyed with speech prosody in four languages (English, Chinese, French, Spanish) by American and Chinese children at 3 to 5 years of…
Openness to World Music Predicts Adaptation to a New Culture among Student Sojourners
Student sojourners temporarily live in a foreign country to pursue higher education. Research has shown that student sojourners’ openness to new experience and cultural values predict their adaptation to the host culture. However, it is unclear whether music – a major medium of cultural communication – also plays a role in adaptation to a host culture. This study examined whether student sojourners’ world music open-earedness (a willingness to ex…
The Influence of Exemplar Variability on Young Children’s Construal of Verb Meaning
Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a highly variable range of exemplars allows children to detect and abstract the commonalities across action…
Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment
Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds by relying on the same acoustic cues that signal emotionality in speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, …
The Role Classifiers Play in Selecting the Referent of a Word
An important cue to the meaning of a new noun is its accompanying classifier. For example, in English, X in "a sheet of X" should refer to a broad, flat object. A classifier is required in Chinese to quantify nouns. Using children's overt responses in an object/picture selection task, past research found reliable semantic knowledge of classifiers in Mandarin-reared children at around age three. However, it is unclear how children's semantic knowl…
The effect of virtual reality action games on attention functions: An EEG study
Psychology (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Language Development and Disorders (7 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (4 works) · Communication (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Language acquisition (3 works)