Led by Prof. Hongwei Ding, the “Language and Mental Health” research team is affiliated to the Speech-Language-Hearing Center of the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and has been funded by the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 18ZDA293). In 2022, several graduate students from this team have published a series of high-quality articles in world-leading journals as first authors, which have profoundly explored the mystery of human speech and received intensive attention from domestic and international scholars. These fruitful accomplishments on academic research and community service reflected the research potential and capability of students from the School of Foreign Languages.

Enze Tang, a second-year master student, investigated the capability of affective prosody recognition in the population with depressive and bipolar conditions, and the research article (DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.06.065) was published online in Journal of Affective Disorders (IF = 6.533, SCI/SSCI, Q1 in Psychiatry/Clinical Neurology) in July 2022.

Minyue Zhang, a first-year doctoral student, published three articles concerning autism individuals in distinguished SSCI linguistics and psychology journals. One article (DOI: 10.1177/1362361321995725) that investigated the affective prosody recognition in the autism spectrum condition was published in Autism (IF = 6.684, SSCI, Q1 in Psychology-Developmental); one research (DOI: 10.1044/2022_JSLHR-21-00438) that explored the multi-modal emotion perception of autism individuals across the vocal, facial and gestural channels was published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (SSCI, Q1 in Linguistics); and another study (DOI: 10.3390/bs12050138) published in Behavioral Sciences discussed the application of virtual reality technology in the education and intervention for autism children.

Other students in this team also obtained remarkable academic achievements in 2022. Doctoral student Hui Zhang published an article (DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101154) investigating the perception of Mandarin tone identification in Journal of Phonetics (SSCI, Q1 in Linguistics), a traditionally renowned journal in the linguistics field. Doctoral student Xin Cui published (DOI: 10.1007/s12144-022-03528-7) the research on how affective prosody influences facial emotion processing in Current Psychology (SSCI, Q2 in Psychology-Multidisciplinary). Doctoral student Yu Chen investigated pitch perception in children with autism, and the manuscript has been accepted by Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (SSCI, Q1 in Linguistics). In addition to these journal publications, four other research articles from students of this team have also been accepted by prestigious conferences in the phonetics community, i.e., Interspeech and Speech Prosody, and relevant findings have already been or will be orally presented in these conferences.

"Language and Mental Health", an emerging research front with the integration of arts, sciences, medicine and engineering knowledge, aims to provide insights for humans’ physical and mental health through the lens of language. With the help of artificial intelligence and neuroscience technology, research in this field tries to reveal the health issues represented by linguistic and paralinguistic information, quantify the specialized experience of medical consultants, develop intelligent products for the early diagnosis of mental disorders, and realize real-time monitoring for individuals’ psychological status. So far, scholars from this research field have reported preliminary findings on the brain mechanisms underlying language and early screening and treatment of speech-affected mental disorders across the whole age spectrum, including autism, depression and dementia.

Over recent years, language health research has attracted growing attention. Since the human brain has in fact been modified by the language use, to associate human languages with mental disorders will be conducive to identifying their causes and countermeasures. In addition, cross-disciplinary collaborations are needed nowadays to address the increasingly complex social problems, and such a trend for academic intergration has also provided new opportunities and assigned new missions for linguistic research today.