Research Interests
- Speech prosody
- Acquired language disorders
- Acoustics in normal and disordered speech
- Voice studies
Research Experience
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.