Lihe Huang

@tongji.edu.cn

A/Prof, School of Foreign Languages & Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care
Tongji University

Lihe Huang


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https://researchid.co/cranehlh
A/Prof. Dr. Lihe Huang is Vice-Chair of School Council, Deputy Director of Research Ethics Committee of School of Foreign Languages, General Secretary of Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care, and Deputy Director of Institute of Linguistics and Multimodality in Tongji University. As one of the leading young scholars in multimodal study and gerontolinguistics in China, He has published widely in multimodal pragmatics, ageing and language and foreign language education and undertaken several research projects granted by different institutions. Lihe Huang is Humboldt Fellow of Germany-based Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Honorary Postgraduate (Research Degree) Supervisor in the University of Liverpool and he conducted research at several world-class universities. He has received several honors and awards both at home and abroad for his academic and teaching performance or social service.

EDUCATION

In June 2007, Lihe Huang graduated with Bachelor Degree in English Language and Literature from English Department at Tongji University; from September 2004 to July 2006, he minored in Law at Fudan University; In March 2010, he graduated with MA Degree in Linguistics from English Department at Tongji University; In February 2016, he graduated with Doctorate in Linguistics from English Department at Tongji University. He is a visiting scholar at University of Cologne, University of Bremen, Technical University of Darmstadt, Brigham Young University, Academia Sinica and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

As one of the leading young scholars in multimodal study and gerontolinguistics in China, Lihe Huang has published widely in multimodal pragmatics, ageing and language and foreign language education and undertaken several research projects granted by different institutions.
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Scopus Publications

Scopus Publications

  • Foreign language learning for active aging: Cognitive and psychosocial benefits of Chinese older adults learning English
    Yiran Che, Lihe Huang
    Educational Gerontology, 2026
    Foreign language learning shows significant potential to improve older adults’ language skills, cognitive functions, and mental health, thereby promoting active aging. This quasi-experimental mixed-methods study examined the cognitive and psychosocial benefits of a 5-month community-based English learning program among 24 Chinese older adults. This research combined quantitative measures (cognitive and psychological tests) with qualitative thematic analysis on interviews concerning participants’ learning experiences and perceived outcomes. Results indicated statistically significant improvements in global cognition, delayed recall, and working memory. Thematic analysis revealed three key themes: (1) the convivial learning atmosphere, (2) the growth in self-efficacy, (3) stronger social connection. The findings indicate that foreign language learning facilitates the interconnected development of human, social, and identity capital among older adults, affirming the role of language resources as a viable pathway to active aging.
  • Which dependency distance measure best reflects cognitive abilities? Evidence from oral production of older adults with varying cognitive levels
    Tsy Yih, Dian Ding, Yiran Che, Lihe Huang
    Linguistics Vanguard, 2026
    Dependency distance is a widely used measure of syntactic complexity, often considered to reflect cognitive abilities such as memory. However, empirical support for this claim remains limited. This study aims to examine whether dependency distance (DD) measures are associated with global cognitive function and single-domain memory performance, and identifies which variant best reflects these abilities. A sequential picture description task elicited clinical speech data from Mandarin-speaking older adults with varying cognitive levels. Multiple regression analyses are used to examine relationships between several DD variants and cognitive performance, as measured by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment–Basic (MoCA-B) and a single-domain Memory Index Score. Results show that all DD variants associated with sentence length are significantly correlated with global cognitive level, whereas removing the influence of sentence length substantially reduces their discriminative power. Among them, mean dependency distance per sentence is the best indicator of cognitive status. In contrast, no DD measure shows a significant association with the memory index. These findings suggest that DD measures can capture speakers’ global cognitive status, with sentence length playing a key role. The study deepens our understanding of the relationship between language and cognition, providing empirical evidence for the Cognitive Commitment in usage-based linguistics.
  • Semantic priming and ERP correlates of predictive processing in Chinese aMCI patients
    Jingjing Yang, Jing Wang, Lihe Huang
    Applied Psycholinguistics, 2025
    Purpose: One of the typical symptoms of patients with aMCI is impaired semantic memory, but it remains unclear whether this impairment affects all types of semantic relationships equally. The primary goal of this study is to assess whether there are differences in the performance of aMCI patients and healthy older adults in tasks involving antonymic and categorical semantic relationships. Method: A delayed congruency judgment task involving different types of semantic relationships (antonymic and categorical) was conducted on 13 normal aging adults and 13 aMCI patients. Participants were presented with word cues for antonyms or category exemplars, followed by targets that were either congruent or incongruent with the cues. Electrophysiological data were recorded simultaneously. Results: The application of the delayed congruency judgment task across various semantic relationships led to the following main findings: 1) Different semantic relationships exhibit distinct semantic priming characteristics. Antonym relationships are highly restricted lexical-semantic relations, allowing participants to make precise predictions, while categorical relationships are less restricted, leading participants to engage in graded activation and activate related features; 2) This study suggests that aMCI patients may only be able to activate specific semantic features when processing antonym relationships and are unable to make precise predictions. In contrast, their impairment in categorical relationships primarily manifests as a narrower range of activation during graded activation.
  • Older adults’ resistance to engaging in reminiscence therapy: A multimodal perspective
    Zhongquan Ma, Lihe Huang
    Discourse and Communication, 2025
    This study employs multimodal conversation analysis to examine the precursors of resistance displays during Reminiscence Therapy (RT) sessions, the format of the resistance exhibited by Chinese older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and the ways it was managed by caregivers. It is found that older adults with MCI display resistance through behaviors like initiating repair, denying question premises, changing topics, refusing overtly, being silent, laughing, and giving minimal responses. Non-verbal cues such as gestures, head movements, averted gaze, and facial expressions are also employed to convey their resistance. In response, caregivers employ various facilitative practices to counter this resistance. Resistance occurs when the assumptions embedded in the caregiver’s question conflict with what the older adults have access to, or the question may infringe on the older adult’s epistemic rights. Our findings also highlight the dynamic and collaborative construction of power through negotiation of resistance and facilitation from epistemic perspective. These insights offer valuable guidance for enhancing the effectiveness of RT and fostering a more collaborative relationship between participants during RT sessions.
  • Ethnic identity construction through multimodal linguistic landscape at Ban Arunotai in Thailand
    Jia Wu, Lihe Huang
    Asian Ethnicity, 2025
  • Lexical and semantic features of Chinese-speaking older adults with mild cognitive impairment across elicitation methods
    Yiran Che, Lihe Huang
    Aphasiology, 2025
    Purpose Although linguistic features in connected speech provide a valuable tool for identifying mild cognitive impairment (MCI), heterogeneous measures and tasks in MCI discourse studies have yielded widely varying outcomes, and the diversity of languages studied is highly limited. This study aims to identify effective measures and tasks to differentiate Chinese-speaking older adults with and without MCI, and to explore task-related differences in connected speech.Method Speech samples from 30 Chinese-speaking older adults with MCI and 30 healthy controls (HCs) were collected using the single picture, picture sequence, and story retelling tasks. Lexical and semantic measures, including parts of speech, lexical diversity, informativeness, conciseness, and efficiency, were analyzed using univariate 2 × 3 mixed ANOVAs with Bonferroni corrections.Results MCI participants produced significantly fewer information units and had lower success rates in generating information units across all three tasks than HCs. There were no significant differences in lexical measures between the MCI and HC groups in the picture sequence task. In the story retelling task, MCI participants showed significantly lower lexical efficiency than HCs. When comparing tasks, the story retelling task was associated with the lowest lexical diversity, information efficiency and density, and success rate of information unit produced. Speech samples elicited by the picture sequence task showed higher lexical efficiency but lower semantic richness than the single picture task, with no significant differences in the success rate of information units produced.Conclusions Cognitive ability and task type both influence discourse performance. Regarding effective measures and tasks, fewer information units and a lower success rate of information units produced are reliable MCI indicators in each task, while lexical measures are less sensitive than semantic measures. The single picture task shows strong validity in identifying MCI, regardless of lexical or semantic measures employed. Regarding differences among tasks, the results suggest that the story retelling task is more demanding, and single picture and picture sequence tasks are better suited for analyzing lexical richness and semantic deficits of MCI patients. This study enhances the understanding of MCI in Chinese-speaking individuals and highlights the task-related differences in connected speech.
  • Word-Frequency Distributions in Chinese- and English- Speaking Older Adults: An Analysis across Languages and Cognitive Statuses
    Tongfu Yang, Lihe Huang, Tsy Yih
    Glottometrics, 2025
    This study investigates how the word-frequency distributions in spoken language reflect cross-linguistic and cognitive differences in older adults. We analyzed Cookie Theft picture descriptions from 96 older adults: 48 Mandarin speakers (24 cognitively impaired and 24 cognitively normal) and 48 English speakers (24 cognitively impaired and 24 cognitively normal) and modeled their word frequency distributions using three functions: Zipf, Zipf-Mandelbrot, and Exponential model. All three models showed excellent goodness of fit at both group and individual levels, indicating that the basic Zipfian structure of lexical distributions is preserved in late life and is not disrupted by mild cognitive impairment. As for the fitting parameters, however, the decay parameter a in the Exponential and Zipf models consistently distinguished Mandarin from English, suggesting that language-specific lexical patterns are robustly encoded in the slope of the distribution but that adding a shift parameter can dampen how clearly a reflects them. By contrast, differences between cognitive groups were weak and inconsistent, implying that parameter a provides only a coarse and context-dependent reflection of cognitive status in short, constrained picture-description tasks.
  • Identifying syntactic biomarkers of cognitive impairment in Mandarin-speaking older adults by applying machine learning approaches across multiple speech tasks
    Tsy Yih, Hao Yang, Lihe Huang, Quan Yao
    Aphasiology, 2025
  • Identifying novel linguistic biomarkers of mild cognitive impairment in Mandarin-speaking older adults: A quantitative syntactic approach
    Tsy Yih, Yiran Yang, Mu Yang, Haitao Liu, Lihe Huang
    Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 2025
    Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is an early symptom of Alzheimer's disease, commonly observed in older adults. The use of low-cost language biomarkers is becoming an emerging trend. This study aims to investigate whether recently proposed measures in the field of Quantitative Syntax and their combinations have the potential to serve as biomarkers for distinguishing between the MCI and cognitively normal (CN) groups. A portion of the Chinese corpus MCGD (CN = 25, MCI = 16) was used. The elderly participants performed a sequential picture description task to produce connected speech. The transcription and annotation were semi-automatically conducted and manually checked. Eleven dependency-based syntactic features were calculated. We assessed the discriminability of both univariate features and multivariate feature combinations using support vector machine. Results show that all features can be grouped into four clusters. Most measures within the largest cluster demonstrate high intercorrelations and are statistically significant in distinguishing between the MCI and CN groups. Among these, mean dependency distance (MDD) exhibits the strongest discriminative ability (AUC = 0.791 [0.610, 0.944]). Two hierarchical features have relatively weaker performance, while dependency direction indicators show almost no group differentiability. Several feature combinations identified slightly improved performance, but the difference was not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that the classic syntactic biomarker MDD remains the best-performing measure for distinguishing between MCI and CN for Mandarin-speaking older adults, while most dependency-based syntactic measures can serve as alternative markers. In the future, combining MDD with features in other domains holds promising potential for early diagnosis.
  • Power Relations in Older Adults' Cognitive Interaction in Clinical Setting: A Multimodal Pragmatic Perspective
    Zhongquan Ma, Lihe Huang
    Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2024
    This study explored the construction of power relations in the cognitive assessment of older adults within the Chinese clinical context. Data is derived from audio and video recordings that nine older adults produced in the cognitive assessment of the Chinese version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic (MoCA-B), which were then annotated and analyzed from a multimodal pragmatic perspective. The study reveals that examiners and older adults employed various speech acts to achieve distinct communicative goals, with power relations between them being reflected through these speech acts. Examiners tend to claim high power, utilizing discourse strategies such as request, interruption, evaluation, rhetorical questions, and directive speech acts. In contrast, older adults assert high power through directive speech acts, rhetorical questions, and interruptions. Both parties also exhibit low power by using confirming questions and explanations. Additionally, gestures, smiles, prosody features, and other non-verbal communicative resources are synergistically employed to exercise power. The interactive mechanism of constructing power relations reveals that age affects older adults’ power relations construction even in a professional setting of the Chinese context. The negotiation between the advanced age of older adults and the expertise of examiners jointly shapes power relations in their interactions.
  • Introduction: What Can Linguistics Do for the Aging World?
    Lihe Huang, Boyd Davis
    Language Aging and Society What can Linguistics do for the Aging World, 2024
  • Language, Aging and Society: What Can Linguistics Do for the Aging World?
    Huang, Lihe, Davis, Boyd
    Language Aging and Society What can Linguistics do for the Aging World, 2024
  • Self-identity construction and pragmatic compensation in a Chinese DAT elder's discourse
    Lihe Huang, Qi Zhu, Deyu Zhou
    Applied Linguistics Review, 2024
  • Promoting second language writing through technology-driven multimodal text feedback
    Weimei Li, Xiuwen Chen, Lihe Huang
    Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 2024
  • Who We Are and How Others See Us: Older Adults’ Images and Identities in Chinese News Media
    Yiran Che, Chi Zhang, Lihe Huang
    Language Aging and Society What can Linguistics do for the Aging World, 2024
  • Automatic speech analysis for detecting cognitive decline of older adults
    Lihe Huang, Hao Yang, Yiran Che, Jingjing Yang
    Frontiers in Public Health, 2024
  • Comparative analysis of sensitivity and specificity of computer-aided cognitive test in screening mild cognitive impairment patients and test of reliability and validity
    Jing Ma, Renren Li, Wei Zhang, Lihe Huang, Xing Wang, Yusheng He, Shasha Jin, Meng Liu, Jiequn Wang, Weixin Xiao, Zengmai Xie, Zheng Lu, Zhiyu Nie, Yunxia Li
    Applied Neuropsychology Adult, 2024
  • Pragmatic impairment and multimodal compensation in older adults with dementia
    Lihe Huang, Yiran Che
    Language and Health, 2023
  • Comprehension of metaphors in patients with mild cognitive impairment: Evidence from behavioral and ERP data
    Jingjing Yang, Lihe Huang
    Acta Psychologica, 2023
  • Older adults’ refusal speech act in cognitive assessment: A multimodal pragmatic perspective
    Lihe Huang, Huiyu Qu, Deyu Zhou
    Frontiers in Psychology, 2023
  • Language and ageing
    Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume Two Second Edition, 2023
  • Incompleteness features in the descriptive discourse of Chinese elders with and without Alzheimer’s disease
    Lihe Huang, Zhuoya Liu, Yunxia Li
    Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 2023
  • Decoding multimodal resources in the master-disciple interactions of Chinese Zen Buddhism
    Lihe Huang, Huiyu Qu
    Chinese Semiotic Studies, 2022
  • Research on nonstroke dementia screening and cognitive function prediction model for older people based on brain atrophy characteristics
    Wei Zhang, Xiaoran Zheng, Renren Li, Meng Liu, Weixin Xiao, Lihe Huang, Feiyang Xu, Ningxin Dong, Yunxia Li
    Brain and Behavior, 2022
  • Neural Mechanism of Repeated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to Enhance Visual Working Memory in Elderly Individuals With Subjective Cognitive Decline
    Meng Liu, Zhi-Yu Nie, Ren-Ren Li, Wei Zhang, Li-He Huang, Jie-Qun Wang, Wei-Xin Xiao, Jialin C. Zheng, Yun-Xia Li
    Frontiers in Neurology, 2021
  • Toward multimodal corpus pragmatics: Rationale, case, and agenda
    Lihe Huang
    Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021
  • Pathological verbal repetition by Chinese elders with Dementia of Alzheimer’s Type: A functional perspective
    Lin Zhu, Lihe Huang
    East Asian Pragmatics, 2020
  • Development of foreign language education in China under the belt and road initiative
    Huang Lihe
    Journal of Language and Education, 2019
  • Analysis of correlation between cerebral perfusion and KIM score of white matter lesions in patients with Alzheimer’s disease
    Ren-Ren Li, Yu-Sheng He, Meng Liu, Zhi-Yu Nie, Li-He Huang, Zheng Lu, Ling-Jing Jin, Yun-Xia Li
    Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 2019
  • Issues on multimodal corpus of Chinese speech acts: A case in multimodal pragmatics
    Lihe Huang
    Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018
  • Intercultural education on the theme of the belt and road initiative: A multimodality oriented pedagogical design
    Lihe Huang
    Belt Road Initiative in the Global Arena Chinese and European Perspectives, 2017
  • The belt & road initiative in the global arena: Chinese and European perspectives
    Yu Cheng, Lilei Song, Lihe Huang
    Belt Road Initiative in the Global Arena Chinese and European Perspectives, 2017
  • Preface
    Yu Cheng, Lilei Song, Lihe Huang
    Belt Road Initiative in the Global Arena Chinese and European Perspectives, 2017
  • Co-curricular activity-based intercultural competence development: students’ outcome of internationalisation at universities
    Lihe Huang
    Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 2017
  • Improving intercultural education at Chinese institutions from german experience
    Lihe Huang
    Journal of International Students, 2015