Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Improving the understandability of health information can significantly increase the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of health education programs for vulnerable populations. There is a pressing need to develop clinically informed computerized tools to enable rapid, reliable assessment of the linguistic understandability of specialized health and medical education resources. This paper fills a critical gap in current patient-oriented health resource development, which requires reliable and accurate evaluation instruments to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of health education resource evaluation.

COVID-19 has influenced teaching all across the globe. The massive use of online learning has created a problem with teachers because of the differences between face-to-face teaching and online teaching. In this chapter, a discussion on how traditional face-to-face teaching differs from online teaching will be shown. How education in Hong Kong is affected by COVID-19 is also summarized. Additionally, the result of a case study in a linguistics course in a university in Hong Kong will be shown to demonstrate the attitudes of students regarding online learning. The mixed-method case study, which consists of survey data of 100 students and semi-structured interviews of eight students, showed that students hold a general mixed feeling towards online learning because of its drawbacks, such as lack of interactions despite the convenience that online learning provides. This chapter ends with a list of suggestions for online teachers.

Linguistic synaesthesia involves conceptual conflicts created by two concepts from two distinct sensory domains. In previous studies, synaesthetic directionality is of pivotal interest. This study goes beyond examining the conventional synaesthetic directionality of five traditional senses by implementing the experimental method and adopting metaphor comprehension theory (i.e., Conceptual Mapping Model in particular) to explore how people comprehend novel synaesthetic metaphors. We used four measurements, including degree of commonness, appropriateness, understandability, and figurativeness, to judge people’s comprehension over two main types of novel synaesthetic metaphors (presented as adjective-noun pairs): novel synaesthetic metaphors that follow conventional synaesthetic mappings and novel synaesthetic metaphors that violate conventional synaesthetic mappings. The empirical findings demonstrated that novel synaesthetic metaphors that follow conventional directionality are more common expressions, more appropriate usages, and much easier to comprehend than those that violate conventional mapping principles; those that follow conventional mapping principles are also judged as more literal than those do not follow conventional directionality. The current study supports Conceptual Metaphor Model’s claim that mapping principles are the underlying reasons for the source-target domain pairings in conceptual metaphors, and further sheds light on theoretical claims about the systematicity of conceptual mappings for linguistic synaesthesia.