Jill Kries - How the brain encode speech and language with aging and aphasia

Title: Speech and language encoding in aging and aphasia

Abstract:
Stroke currently affects more than 7 million people in the US alone, of which one third suffers from aphasia, a language disorder. In fact, aphasia is more common than Parkinson's disease, but scientific study of aphasia has been much sparser. Investigating aphasia does not only help understanding the disorder better, but also to identify mechanisms that are crucial for successful language processing in the neurotypical brain. Therefore, I research how speech and language are processed in individuals with aphasia and neurotypical age-matched (thus older) control participants. Recording EEG data while people listen to natural speech allows us to investigate neural encoding at sensory, acoustic as well as more cognitive, linguistic levels – all derived from the same dataset. My research leverages this ecologically valid approach to study changes in speech processing across the adult life span, and in people with stroke-induced aphasia.

Short bio:
Jill Kries is a neuropsychologist by training. In 2023, she obtained her PhD at KU Leuven in cognitive neuroscience and is currently a postdoc at Stanford University, where she works on computational modeling of speech and language processing, and is advised by Laura Gwilliams. CV and publications can be found under https://linktr.ee/jillkries