Research

Research Interests

  • Speech prosody
  • Acquired language disorders
  • Acoustics in normal and disordered speech
  • Voice studies

Research Experience

Graduate Researcher (Aug. 2015-present)
The Brain and Behavior Laboratory, Nathan Kline Institute, Orangeburg, NY
Project: Prosodic aspects of individuals with Parkinson’s Disease who speak Mandarin under different speech tasks (on-going)
 
Research Assistant (Aug. 2013 – Jul. 2015)
Department of Linguistics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Projects: Bilingual lexical recognition; Conjunction Cohesion of L2 learners; Orthography and L2 learning

Current project

Prosodic aspects in individuals with Parkinson’s disease who speak Mandarin

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that disrupts patients’ physical mobility and speech. Speech of individuals with PD is featured with abnormal speech prosody due to the weakness of speech motor functions. In tone languages such as Chinese Mandarin, the mechanism of speech prosody is more complex, because pitch carries a heavier functional load and is used to discriminate both lexical and intonational information

This project is to investigate the prosodic aspects in the speech of PD individuals who speak Mandarin in terms of listeners’ perception as well as acoustic features.

Conferences & Presentations

Chen, X & Sidtis, D. (2017, November). Sentence Focus in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease Who Speak Mandarin. Poster for presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention. November 9 -11. 2017. Los Angeles, CA.

Chen, X & Mok, P. (2014). Rhythmic Correspondence between Music and Speech in English Vocal music. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 7, 723-727. Dublin.

Chen, X. (2013). Rhythmic Correspondence between Music and Speech in English Vocal Music. Annual Research Forum of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. 2013. Hong Kong.