Hi, I am Matthew, currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Centre for Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyU).
Born with moderately severe hearing loss, I fortunately grew up integrating pretty well into the hearing environment (I suppose), accompanied by a curiosity about speech perception. Hoping to contribute to the development of hearing assistive technology, I studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate.
Soon I realized that to advance hearing assistive technology, having a better understanding of the neural mechanisms of speech perception was essential. As such, I began my PhD investigating brain dynamics via electroencephalography (EEG). My doctoral dissertation involved the characterization of the resting brain in ageing, bridging digital signal processing and neuroscience.
While my dissertation focused on the resting-state, I have always wanted to know more about how our ongoing brain oscillations facilitate the binding of acoustic and linguistic units into comprehensible sentences and paragraphs. This led me to apply for several grants, including the HKRGC Postdoctoral Fellowship, to study speech perception via the cortical tracking phenomenon. Ultimately, I would like to understand how different levels of linguistic information are processed and integrated, and how these mechanisms are affected by ageing and cognitive decline.
Relatively recently, the human-level linguistic competence of large language models (LLMs) has drawn my interest. By manipulating and experimenting on LLM components and architectures, I aim to use LLMs as a tool to model human behavioural as well as neurophysiological responses. The two black boxes, the brain and the LLMs, can be complementary, and we can use one to help study the other.
In my spare time, I enjoy strolling, hiking and taking photos, or just sleeping (doing research is exhausting, isn't it?).
Interests
- Cognitive neuroscience of ageing
- Cognitive decline
- Speech perception
- EEG
- model-brain alignment
Recent News
Jan 2026: Our paper got accepted to Speech Prosody 2026, see you in Philadelphia!
- Ma, M. K.-H., Fong, M. C.-M., Feng, Y., Li, C. P.-H., & Wang, W. S. Keep Calm and Listen: Subjective Cognitive Decline Modulates Cortical Tracking of Speech and Music in Different Expressive Styles.
Nov 2025: We presented our work in EMNLP2025.
- Xie, C., Ma, M. K.-H.*, Wang, W., & Wang, W. S. (2025). Context and POS in Action: A Comparative Study of Chinese Homonym Disambiguation in Human and Language Models. In C. Christodoulopoulos, T. Chakraborty, C. Rose, & V. Peng (Eds.), *Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 27596–27613). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1404/
Sep 2025: We published a new preprint on arXiv.
- Ma, M. K.-H., Fong, M. C.-M., Feng, Y., Li, C. P.-H., & Wang, W. S. (2025). More than a feeling: Expressive style influences cortical speech tracking in subjective cognitive decline (No. arXiv:2509.21277). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.21277
Aug 2025: We presented our work in ACL2025.
- Ma, M. K.-H.*, Xie, C.*, Wang, W., & Wang, W. S. (2025). Exploring Layer-wise Representations of English and Chinese Homonymy in Pre-trained Language Models. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, 19705–19724. https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.1011/
Aug 2025: We presented our work in EMBC2025.
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Ma, M. K.-H., Fong, M. C.-M., & Wang, W. S. (2025). A Reliability Study in Resting-state EEG Network Characteristics: Frequency of Interest, Number of Oscillatory Cycles and Thresholding. 2025 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC58623.2025.11251614
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Fong, M. C.-M., Ma, M. K.-H., Ng, X. S.-W., Liu, J. C. H., Waye, M. M. Y., Chien, W. T., & Wang, W. S. (2025). Regional Brain Age Measures Based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)—Symmetry Properties and Associations with Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence. 2025 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC58623.2025.11252950
Contact
Email: khmma@polyu.edu.hk