Patrick C M Wong
Biographic Data
| ID | 459317 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick C M Wong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick C M |
| FAMILY NAME | Wong |
| SIGNATURE | WONG P C M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6105-5027 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Robust word learning in a noisy world
Much of what we know about word learning comes from experimental paradigms that treat the extraction of word forms (segmentation) and the assignment of meaning (mapping) as separable processes. Although this division has yielded important insights, it may underestimate how their coordination supports learning in natural environments. Evidence from statistical segmentation—a widely studied mechanism for word discovery—suggests that representations…
Cross-talker lexical tone discrimination in infancy
This study investigated how infants deal with cross-talker variability in the perception of native lexical tones, paying specific attention to developmental changes and the role of task demands. Using the habituation-based visual fixation procedures, we tested Cantonese-learning infants of different age groups on their ability to discriminate Cantonese Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 3 (mid level) produced by either multiple talkers or a single talk…
Age-related changes in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech: A longitudinal study
This longitudinal study investigated modifications in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech (IDS) to children aged 15 and 23 months. The results showed that to children at both ages, mothers increased intonational pitch height and pitch variability across utterances, and produced lexical tones with generally larger tonal space and greater intra-talker tone variation within categories in IDS compared to adult-directed sp…
Semantic overreliance as a suboptimal compensation for syntactic impairments in children with Developmental Language Disorder
The neurocognitive dynamics of semantic-syntactic interplay are not well understood in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This study examined the N400, P600 and their interplay in Cantonese-speaking children with DLD and age-matched typically developing (TD) children, by manipulating semantic and syntactic violations in Chinese classifier-noun agreement. Behaviorally, children with DLD demonstrated overall lower accu…
Neural Evidence for Syntactic Unification in Second Language Sentence Comprehension: A Time-Frequency Analysis
This study investigates whether syntactic unification occurs during online L2 sentence comprehension using time-frequency analysis. We measured the oscillatory power changes in native English speakers and L1-Cantonese L2-English speakers while they were reading well-formed English sentences, syntactically intact nonsense sentences, and random word lists. Additionally, we conducted traditional ERP analyses to test L2 speakers' sensitivity to NP-in…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Neural Basis of Second Language Speech Learning – Past and Future: A Commentary on “The Neurocognitive Underpinnings of Second Language Processing: Knowledge Gains From the Past and Future Outlook”
The state-of-the-art article by van Hell provided an excellent overview of the current state of the science in the neural and neurocognitive basis of second language (L2) processing and learning. While the target article devoted much effort to reviewing studies related to the syntactic and semantic components of language and to a lesser extent to the lexicon, it is important to also consider the phonetic and phonological components of language in…
Variability in Asian parents’ English and mathematics skills: A family-based study
What explains parental English word reading and mathematics performance? The present study examined whether parent-, family-, and child-related variables explain parents’ English word reading and mathematics performances among two groups of Asian parents. The data were collected from 152 Hong Kong and 280 Cebu City (Philippines) parents who learn English as a second language. The academic performances of their children (Hong Kong: Mean age = 8.72…
The tone atlas of perceptual discriminability and perceptual distance: Four tone languages and five language groups
Some prior investigations suggest that tone perception is flexible, reasonably independent of native phonology, whereas others suggest it is constrained by native phonology. We address this issue in a systematic and comprehensive investigation of adult tone perception. Sampling from diverse tone and non-tone speaking communities, we tested discrimination of the three major tone systems (Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin) that dominate the tone perception…
The effect of tone hyperarticulation in Cantonese infant-directed speech on toddlers’ word recognition in the second year of life
The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners’ language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirmed. This study investigated whether toddlers’ word processing was affected by tone hyperarticulation in the IDS of a tone language. Nineteen- and 23-month-old Cantonese-learning toddlers completed a familiar word recognition task and were tested (a) in t…
The Hong Kong Grocery Shopping Dialog Task (HK-GSDT): A Quick Screening Test for Neurocognitive Disorders
The Hong Kong Grocery Shopping Dialog Task (HK-GSDT) is a short and easy-to-administer cognitive test developed for quickly screening neurocognitive disorders (NCDs). In the test, participants are instructed to do a hypothetical instrumental activity of daily living task of purchasing ingredients for a dish from a grocery store and verbally describe the specific shopping procedures. The current study aimed to validate the test with a sample of 54…
The ability to use contextual cues to achieve phonological constancy emerges by 14 months
The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e., acoustic cues within the target word) to form phonological categories and to learn words. The present s…
What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music
Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative…
Individuals with congenital amusia do not show context-dependent perception of tonal categories
Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music
Lexical and Prosodic Pitch Modifications in Cantonese Infant-directed Speech
The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones provides a unique opportunity to shed light on this, as lexical tones are phonemically contrastive, yet th…
Cortical and Subcortical Processing of Linguistic Pitch Patterns
Pitch is one of the major prosodic cues in speech. A central research question is the way the brain derives the percept of pitch from incoming acoustic information. After introducing the functional architecture of the human auditory system, this chapter reviews lesion and neuroimaging studies and human electrophysiological studies of the processing of linguistically relevant pitch patterns at the cortical and subcortical levels, respectively. Rec…
Bilingual speech perception and learning: A review of recent trends
Over the past several years, the field of bilingual speech perception has seen a substantial increase in both the number of publications and in the amount of interest directed at its findings. Consequently, the time is ripe to assess the state of the field, what we have accomplished and where we have yet to go. Although we cannot capture the full state of the field in the space of this paper, we hope to summarize the major trends that have led to…
Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design
Studies evaluating phonological contrast learning typically investigate either the predictiveness of specific pretraining aptitude measures or the efficacy of different instructional paradigms. However, little research considers how these factors interact—whether different students learn better from different types of instruction—and what the psychological basis for any interaction might be. The present study demonstrates that successfully learni…
Individual variability in cue-weighting and lexical tone learning
Speech sound patterns can be discerned using multiple acoustic cues. The relative weighting of these cues is known to be language-specific. Speech-sound training in adults induces changes in cue-weighting such that relevant acoustic cues are emphasized. In the current study, the extent to which individual variability in cue weighting contributes to differential success in learning to use foreign sound patterns was examined. Sixteen English-speaki…
Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults
The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigat…
Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults
The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigat…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults
The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigat…
Individual variability in cue-weighting and lexical tone learning
Speech sound patterns can be discerned using multiple acoustic cues. The relative weighting of these cues is known to be language-specific. Speech-sound training in adults induces changes in cue-weighting such that relevant acoustic cues are emphasized. In the current study, the extent to which individual variability in cue weighting contributes to differential success in learning to use foreign sound patterns was examined. Sixteen English-speaki…
Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design
Studies evaluating phonological contrast learning typically investigate either the predictiveness of specific pretraining aptitude measures or the efficacy of different instructional paradigms. However, little research considers how these factors interact—whether different students learn better from different types of instruction—and what the psychological basis for any interaction might be. The present study demonstrates that successfully learni…
Bilingual speech perception and learning: A review of recent trends
Over the past several years, the field of bilingual speech perception has seen a substantial increase in both the number of publications and in the amount of interest directed at its findings. Consequently, the time is ripe to assess the state of the field, what we have accomplished and where we have yet to go. Although we cannot capture the full state of the field in the space of this paper, we hope to summarize the major trends that have led to…
Cortical and Subcortical Processing of Linguistic Pitch Patterns
Pitch is one of the major prosodic cues in speech. A central research question is the way the brain derives the percept of pitch from incoming acoustic information. After introducing the functional architecture of the human auditory system, this chapter reviews lesion and neuroimaging studies and human electrophysiological studies of the processing of linguistically relevant pitch patterns at the cortical and subcortical levels, respectively. Rec…
What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music
Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative…
Individuals with congenital amusia do not show context-dependent perception of tonal categories
Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music
Lexical and Prosodic Pitch Modifications in Cantonese Infant-directed Speech
The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones provides a unique opportunity to shed light on this, as lexical tones are phonemically contrastive, yet th…
Variability in Asian parents’ English and mathematics skills: A family-based study
What explains parental English word reading and mathematics performance? The present study examined whether parent-, family-, and child-related variables explain parents’ English word reading and mathematics performances among two groups of Asian parents. The data were collected from 152 Hong Kong and 280 Cebu City (Philippines) parents who learn English as a second language. The academic performances of their children (Hong Kong: Mean age = 8.72…
The tone atlas of perceptual discriminability and perceptual distance: Four tone languages and five language groups
Some prior investigations suggest that tone perception is flexible, reasonably independent of native phonology, whereas others suggest it is constrained by native phonology. We address this issue in a systematic and comprehensive investigation of adult tone perception. Sampling from diverse tone and non-tone speaking communities, we tested discrimination of the three major tone systems (Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin) that dominate the tone perception…
The effect of tone hyperarticulation in Cantonese infant-directed speech on toddlers’ word recognition in the second year of life
The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners’ language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirmed. This study investigated whether toddlers’ word processing was affected by tone hyperarticulation in the IDS of a tone language. Nineteen- and 23-month-old Cantonese-learning toddlers completed a familiar word recognition task and were tested (a) in t…
The Hong Kong Grocery Shopping Dialog Task (HK-GSDT): A Quick Screening Test for Neurocognitive Disorders
The Hong Kong Grocery Shopping Dialog Task (HK-GSDT) is a short and easy-to-administer cognitive test developed for quickly screening neurocognitive disorders (NCDs). In the test, participants are instructed to do a hypothetical instrumental activity of daily living task of purchasing ingredients for a dish from a grocery store and verbally describe the specific shopping procedures. The current study aimed to validate the test with a sample of 54…
The ability to use contextual cues to achieve phonological constancy emerges by 14 months
The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e., acoustic cues within the target word) to form phonological categories and to learn words. The present s…
Neural Basis of Second Language Speech Learning – Past and Future: A Commentary on “The Neurocognitive Underpinnings of Second Language Processing: Knowledge Gains From the Past and Future Outlook”
The state-of-the-art article by van Hell provided an excellent overview of the current state of the science in the neural and neurocognitive basis of second language (L2) processing and learning. While the target article devoted much effort to reviewing studies related to the syntactic and semantic components of language and to a lesser extent to the lexicon, it is important to also consider the phonetic and phonological components of language in…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Cross-talker lexical tone discrimination in infancy
This study investigated how infants deal with cross-talker variability in the perception of native lexical tones, paying specific attention to developmental changes and the role of task demands. Using the habituation-based visual fixation procedures, we tested Cantonese-learning infants of different age groups on their ability to discriminate Cantonese Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 3 (mid level) produced by either multiple talkers or a single talk…
Age-related changes in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech: A longitudinal study
This longitudinal study investigated modifications in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech (IDS) to children aged 15 and 23 months. The results showed that to children at both ages, mothers increased intonational pitch height and pitch variability across utterances, and produced lexical tones with generally larger tonal space and greater intra-talker tone variation within categories in IDS compared to adult-directed sp…
Semantic overreliance as a suboptimal compensation for syntactic impairments in children with Developmental Language Disorder
The neurocognitive dynamics of semantic-syntactic interplay are not well understood in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This study examined the N400, P600 and their interplay in Cantonese-speaking children with DLD and age-matched typically developing (TD) children, by manipulating semantic and syntactic violations in Chinese classifier-noun agreement. Behaviorally, children with DLD demonstrated overall lower accu…
Neural Evidence for Syntactic Unification in Second Language Sentence Comprehension: A Time-Frequency Analysis
This study investigates whether syntactic unification occurs during online L2 sentence comprehension using time-frequency analysis. We measured the oscillatory power changes in native English speakers and L1-Cantonese L2-English speakers while they were reading well-formed English sentences, syntactically intact nonsense sentences, and random word lists. Additionally, we conducted traditional ERP analyses to test L2 speakers' sensitivity to NP-in…
Robust word learning in a noisy world
Much of what we know about word learning comes from experimental paradigms that treat the extraction of word forms (segmentation) and the assignment of meaning (mapping) as separable processes. Although this division has yielded important insights, it may underestimate how their coordination supports learning in natural environments. Evidence from statistical segmentation—a widely studied mechanism for word discovery—suggests that representations…
Psychology (20 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Language Development and Disorders (12 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Perception (9 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (9 works) · Developmental psychology (7 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (7 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (6 works)