“Iconicity and semantic transparency in Hong Kong Sign Language: Evidence from ratings and three guessing paradigms” published in Language and Cognition By HKU Linguistics Post date 2026-04-02 We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article in Language and Cognition by Arthur, Aaron, Mavies, Rachel, Judy and Youngah, titled Iconicity and semantic transparency in Hong Kong Sign Language: Evidence from ratings and three guessing paradigms. This study investigates how strongly signs in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) are perceived to resemble their meanings, a property known as iconicity, and how this relates to how easily meanings can be [...]

Thoughts on morphological spread Date: 9 Apr 2026 (Thu) Time: 4:00 pm Venue: CPD LG.08 Centennial Campus

Big questions, little data: exploiting NLP methods for language variation and change Date: 26 Mar 2026 (Thu) Time: 4:00 pm Venue: CPD LG.08 Centennial Campus

Outermost wins in Dinka and the theory of nonconcatenative morphology Date: 12 Mar 2026 (Thu) Time: 4:00 pm Zoom: https://hku.zoom.us/j/97684494584?pwd=beh8mFIFjrVVB2DMaSTj57UlveXCub.1 Meeting ID: 976 8449 4584 Password: 899952

“Bottom-up modeling of phoneme learning: Universal sensitivity and language-specific transformation” published in Speech Communication We are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper titled “Bottom-up modeling of phoneme learning: Universal sensitivity and language-specific transformation” in the journal Speech Communication. This study was conducted by Frank and Youngah. The research investigates the emergence and development of universal phonetic sensitivity during early phonological learning using an unsupervised modeling approach. The authors trained autoencoder models on raw acoustic input from English and Mandarin to simulate bottom-up perceptual development, focusing on phoneme contrast learning. The results demonstrate that phoneme-like categories and feature-aligned [...]