题 目：儿童外语学习的课堂教学：来自纵向追踪脑电研究的证据

主 讲： Urs Maurer 博士（香港中文大学心理学系）

日 期： 2016 年 5 月 4 日
时 间：上午 10:00-11:00
地 点：仓前校区恕园 3 号一楼报告厅
摘 要：
In some Swiss schools children learn English as a foreign language from 2nd grade of primary school. We investigated in a longitudinal study whether individual differences (reading difficulties,bilingualism) would affect learning English as a foreign language at the behavioral level, and whether we could identify neural markers of learning English using EEG. We tested over 100 children immediately before learning English (mean age: 7.5 years) and followed them up after one year of learning English (mean age: 8.9 years). The results showed that reading difficulty, but not bilingualism, was associated with poorer English skills. At the neural level, no significant changes in the mismatch negativity to English speech sounds (relative to native speech sounds) was found.Similarly, no changes in neural print tuning were found that were specific to the newly learned language. The results suggest that reading difficulty is a risk factor for learning foreign languages,while bilingualism is not. The results also indicate that vocabulary gains at the behavioral level were achieved, even though basic neural language processing mechanisms seem to have remained unchanged. Thus, children may use specialized speech sound processes and print tuning from their first language to process the corresponding aspects of the new foreign language in order to extract meaning. The results also suggest that two hours of classroom-based foreign language learning may not be sufficiently intensive to drive neural changes in basic-level language processes such as speech sound processing or print tuning of a new language.
专家简介：
Urs Maurer 博士任职香港中文大学心理学系副教授， 曾在瑞士苏黎世大学任职研究教授和在康奈尔大学威尔医学院从事博士后工作。 Maurer 教授是国际著名的文字加工脑机制研究专家，他主要采用脑电和功能性磁共振成像技术非常系统地研究了阅读获得、 阅读障碍、 外语学习和跨语言阅读的神经基础。