One of the most important and impressive things that humans can do is produce sentences effortlessly and with very few errors. Impaired sentence production is pervasive in patients with aphasia, a neurogenic language disorder affecting 15 million people worldwide. Yet, its treatments remain scarce. In this talk, I demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit syntactic priming in improving aphasia, drawing from the measures of production choices, eyetracking, treatment efficacy, and individual differences. I argue that syntactic priming facilitates language (re-)learning in aphasia and that encoding abstract grammatical structures is an essential cognitive mechanism that supports robust and enduring aphasia recovery.
Speaker
Prof. Jiyeon LEE
Jiyeon Lee, PhD, CCC-SLP is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and directs the Aphasia Research Lab at Purdue University. She received a Bachelor of Art from Ajou University (South Korea), a Master’s in Linguistics from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a PhD and Master’s in Speech-Language Pathology from Northwestern University. She has published dozes of articles mainly looking at sentence processing in persons with aphasia and related neurogenic disorders and language learning and recovery in aphasia. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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