Your brain knows better than you do: Reading in the brain

2022-04-27

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Tanjun.Liu@xjtlu.edu.cn

Details

  • Time: 16:00-17:00
  • Date: Wednesday, 27 April
  • Venue: Zhumu, please contact Tanjun.Liu@xjtlu.edu.cn for Zhumu details

Abstract

This talk is a brief introduction to subconscious reading. To be specific, it is about how our brain deals with Chinese characters when we do not attend to them, which in fact happens in our life quite often. So the scientific question is: how does this kind of reading work? To demystify this reading process, I will talk about our brain and Event-Related Potentials, a technique to allow us to “see” what happens in the brain when we read inattentively. Then I will focus on a special experiment design to capture the dynamics in the reading process. The findings indicate our brain processes lexical information within half of a second, in a two-stage fashion. The theoretical and practical implications will also be discussed.

Speaker

Dawei Wei is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics, XJTLU. Before joining XJTLU, he worked and/or has carried out research in several universities and institutes in China and Spain, including the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), the Beijing Normal University State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and the Basque Centeron Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Dr.Wei’s research lies at the intersection of psycho-/neuro-linguistics and applied linguistics. He is interested in how English and Chinese are acquired as foreign languages (EFL/CFL) and how Chinese literacy is acquired by native and non-native readers. Recently he has been working on government-funded projects concerning Chinese language acquisition in Tibetan children, and studies of dyslexia in underprivileged areas in northwestern China.

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