This semester, Zhou Pin has just returned from a study tour in the UK and has been leading the research innovation team activities of the young research core teachers in the College. The research innovation team of “Exploring the theory of embodied semantics based on modern neuroscience” led by Zhou Pin has held seminars once every two weeks. The leadership of the College attaches great importance to team building, hoping to change the traditional mode by establishing a research team.
In recent years, Ms. Zhou has focused on the frontier theoretical exploration of the intersection of linguistics and neuroscience, and has gained a certain degree of popularity in the domestic cognitive neurolinguistics community, which is highly recognized by her peers. She hopes to establish the first research base of embodied semantics theory in China to seize academic opportunities, develop new directions in semantics research and carry out cutting-edge linguistic science research. In addition to Professor Hugo Critchley, a neuroscientist from the University of Sussex, UK, and Professor Sarah Garfinkel, a neuroscientist from University College London, the team members include five PhD graduates from prestigious universities at home and abroad who have been newly introduced to our institute in recent years, including Wang Yingyu, Li Guhui, Wu Mengjiao, Song Jingyao, Zhou Xiang, and Chen Lin.
In addition, several of their graduate students were required to participate in each activity, and were encouraged to ask questions and think critically about previous research. Each time, the discussion was very lively, and the students benefited a lot from it, and they were impressed with the scientific research, scientific spirit, and critical thinking.
Her paper “The Development of Neuroscience and the Emergence of Embodied Semantics” was published in this year’s prestigious journal Foreign Languages. Song Jingyao also received a post-grant from the National Social Science Fund of China.
They will continue to work together with the support and assistance of the faculty to achieve more results.
(Reported by the College of Foreign Languages office; Translated by Li Huixian)
