Jennifer Mack (Department of Communication Disorders and Graduate Program in Neuroscience and Behavior, UMass Amherst) will present “Comprehending speakers with aphasia: What are the effects of aphasia education?” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday November 12, in ILC S331. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Abstract:
Aphasia is a language disability caused by damage to the brain (most commonly a stroke) that affects over 2 million people in the US, resulting in difficulty in communicating one’s thoughts even though intelligence remains intact. Despite the prevalence and societal impacts of aphasia, fewer than 10% of US adults know what aphasia is. Many people with aphasia (PWA) find low public knowledge of aphasia to be one of the most challenging aspects of living with aphasia, and a substantial barrier to communicating successfully. However, no research has examined the effects of education about aphasia on the ability to communicate successfully with PWA. In this talk, I will discuss a new line of research investigating the effects of aphasia education on non-aphasic listeners’ comprehension of speakers with aphasia. First, I will synthesize two relevant lines of prior research: (1) the communication disorders literature on how education of listeners impacts their perception of speakers with communication disabilities and (2) the psycholinguistic literature examining how language comprehension adapts to atypical speech/language input. Then, I will present preliminary results from an eye-tracking experiment testing whether aphasia education impacts listeners’ online comprehension of a speaker with aphasia. Finally, I will discuss potential implications of this work for aphasia education campaigns as well as understanding how the language comprehension system adapts to neurologically diverse speakers.

PhD Student Mari Kugemoto and Shota Momma will present a paper entitled ‘Producing long distance dependencies in Japanese and English‘ at the International Symposium on Japanese Psycholinguistics from Comparative Perspectives. IJPCP2021 takes place online September 11th and 12, and registration is free.

Good luck Mari and Shota!

Ellen Lau, University of Maryland, will present “New ways forward in neurolinguistics: more thought, less words” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday March 12. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Register here: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAsde6vrTMjHtCx7Az5AhCgXukmgiFYM5ti

Abstract:
Figuring out the neural underpinnings of language processing is hard; we have to hold onto so many pieces from different disciplines that it’s easy for a few basics to fall off our ‘stack’. I’ll discuss a few that I’ve recently remembered myself, and that give me hope that I could actually have a few coherent things to say when I’m supposed to teach what is known about the neuroanatomy of language processing. First, we neuroscientists of language too often conflate language with non-linguistic thought and conceptual knowledge systems. We forget that when we observe ‘semantic’ neural responses, they may often reflect the activity of these non-linguistic conceptual systems, and we miss too many relevant insights about these systems from research in other domains of cognitive science. Changing my ways, here I will draw from theories about parietal cortex’s role in binding object representations in visual scene perception, to hypothesize that its responses during language comprehension reflect something like the binding of conceptual properties to discourse files. Second, following others in the field (Fedorenko et al. 2020, Matchin & Hickok 2020), I’ll note that neuroscience of language has been missing explicit representational theories about stored language knowledge—the ‘lexicon’—and that this has been blocking our progress on neuroanatomical models of syntax. The folk idea that language is a bunch of simple sound-to-meaning pairs (‘words’) is rooted deep in our collective psyche, and even when we publicly disavow it, ‘under the hood’ it continues to shape how we develop our neuroscience of language theories and how we reason about our experiments. Looking at some problematic cases in my own past work, I’ll argue that as a field we need to stop using vague/incoherent terminology like ‘word’ and ‘lexico-semantic’, and instead commit to sketching out explicit assumptions about how our rich language knowledge is organized every time we embark on an investigation of the neural basis of language production or comprehension.