Useful stuff

Here is about what I want to share based on my personal experience, it can also be a file drawer for myself. Hopefully, they can be helpful for some of you.

🧠 I believe a better way is to learn from doing.

Useful readings & courses

Introduction to Linguistics

  • The study of language by George Yule: Nice to start the journey of Linguistics.

Phonetics

  • A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology by R. L. Trask: A book for beginners and for advanced learners to consolidate their understanding of some concepts.

  • A Course in Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged: Everything about the basics of Phonetics, must be read before entering this field.

Praat for Linguistics

  • Using Praat for Linguistic Research by Will Styler: A useful manual to refer to.

Cognitive Neuroscience

  • The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Jamie Ward: I have tried to read the whole book but found that if you are more interested in some specific topics, then reading those relevant ones can be faster and more helpful.

  • Neuroscience: Science of the Brain: an introduction for young students by British Neuroscience Association and European Dana Alliance for the Brain: A short booklet to start your journey in Neuroscience.

  • Taiwan Cognitive Neuroscience Summer School (臺灣認知神經科學暑期學校): It covers most elementary topics based on The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, and also some advanced topics and workshops. The biggest advantages are: 1) courses are in Mandarin Chinese; 2) there are discussion sessions for Q&A. 

  • Cleaning up the Brickyard: How Theory and Methodology Shape Experiments in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language by van der Burght et al., 2023: Recently, I have read a nice commentary paper on the common problems that scientists of the interdisciplinary field of Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience may think about and some potential solutions. It can be a general guidance of understanding this specific field for students and researchers.

Computational Neuroscience

  • Neuromatch Academy: Excellent but challenging experience for me. You can find all materials online as well, although I feel learning with others is more motivating.

EEG/ERP

fMRI

  • Handbook of Functional MRI: Data Analysis by Russell Poldrack et al.: Difficult for me, it’ll be easier to read if you have some/strong mathematic background.

  • Short Introduction to the General Linear Model for Neuroimaging by Mark Jenkinson et al.: Easier to start using GLM to analyze fMRI data.

SPSS/R

  • Discovering Statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics/R by Andy Field: My favourite books on Statistics. You can learn both theoretical and practical things. After your reading (which can be challenging), you will have a good taste in statistics.

Visualization

  • Guide to Create Beautiful Graphics in R by Alboukadel Kassambara: Although there are various manuals online for visualization in R, this one can be a good start to grasp.

Bayesian Analysis

Useful toolkits

Acoustic analysis

  • ProsodyPro: A Praat script for large-scale systematic analysis of continuous prosodic events by Yi Xu.

Export publishable tables

  • Flextable package in R: see details in its gallery.

How to build a homepage

  • I felt that using Google sites is the easiest thing for me, compared with other methods that you can find online. However, I am now developing some tutorial materials based on R markdown and thus feel Quarto is very helpful for light coding, it has the templates for academic use as well.

Jockey Club Scholarship

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Scholarship is one of the highest scholarships that undergraduates in Hong Kong can apply for. It required application forms and three interviews in 2017. For the application forms, I have what I wrote in 2017, both are immature and flawed. Although the most important thing to “win” this scholarship was your GPA and interview performance, you can still have a look at these materials. As I can remember, they answered two different questions in each language. [Chinese] [English]