Past events: Narly Golestani. Language processing in the healthy, dysfunctional and expert brain

What: Language processing in the healthy, dysfunctional and expert brain

Where:  Zoom room 2

Who: Narly Golestani, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland and University of Vienna, Austria, Vienna.

When:  Thursday, November 18th, 1:30 PM.

There are large individual differences in speech and language processing skills at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy, and these are likely modulated by experience-dependent plasticity but also by possible differences in innate predisposition. I will provide an overview of a body of research in which we have explored brain functional and structural differences underlying speech and language processing, in the context of healthy individual differences but also extending to multilingualism, to language expertise (e.g. in phoneticians and simultaneous interpreters) and to dysfunction (e.g. in dyslexia and aphasia). In this context I will also describe our rapidly growing body of work on variation in auditory cortex anatomy and phonetic learning, dyslexia, aphasia and musicianship, and describe how we plan to explore the relative influences of nature vs nurture on these individual differences, across the lifespan.