Congratulations, Claudia!

Congratulations to Claudia Bruns for passing her PhD viva last Tuesday! Claudia’s dissertation is titled “A usage-based approach to language processing and intervention in aphasia”, her project was supervised by Dr Suzanne Beeke, Prof Rosemary Varley and Dr Vitor Zimmerer. She was examined by Dr Paul Conroy (University of Manchester) and Dr Carolyn Bruce (UCL) and passed with no corrections! This reflects the experience we had with Claudia, who has been an excellent student and colleague.

Below are pictures from our celebration in our weird little kitchen.

Blurry and from left to right: Dr Carolyn Bruce, Dr Paul Conroy, Dr Claudia Bruns

Rosemary, Vitor, Claudia and Suzanne

- Vitor

Poster: Language structure across dementia types and changes during disease progression.

Our lab, in collaboration witrh UCL's Dementia Research Centre, is going to present a poster tomorrow at the Alzheimer's Society Annual Conference. You can download it here.

Congratulations to Tom Shortland!

Last year Tom Shortland submitted his dissertation as part of his MSc in Speech and Language Sciences course. The title was An investigation of the influence of prosodic cueing on the ablity of individuals with aphasia to make grammaticality judgments, and the project was supervised by Rosemary Varley and Vitor Zimmerer. The project is a spinoff of Sabrina Mahmood's PhD work as we started to ask more questions about modality effects in the sentence processing of aphasic and neurotypical individuals.

Tom was an excellent student who conducted his work thoughtfully and thoroughly. He received a great mark and recently was awarded a Robin Tavistock student prize for excellent work in the field of aphasia.

We are planning to turn his dissertation into a manuscript for peer-review. Tom has started his job as a speech and language therapist at a hospital in Norfolk.

- Vitor

#SoA2017

Although Geneva does not have a lovely beach like last year's SoA venue in Venice, our lab enjoyed the gorgeous views during the conference boat trip on lake Geneva.

We presented four current projects on sentence processing in aphasia. It was great to discuss our work with colleagues from around the world. Check out #SoA2017 on twitter to find out more about what happened at the conference - you will come across our very own tweets by @Vit_Zim, @vmeitanis and @claudihei ...

- Vanessa & Claudia

The lab at the British Psychological Society conference

In case you are at the British Psychological Society conference in Newcastle, you may be interested in our symposium on Psychosis and Language on Friday, starting 9.30am. Each talk will present some of the results from our AHRC project on language in schizophrenia and aphasia. The symposium on Friday will focus particularly on language differences between people with schizophrenia with and without formal thought disorder. Here is the programme.

- Vitor

The Mind vs. The Brain: The Infinite Monkey Cage

Research from the lab, reporting residual cognition in severe aphasia, was described by neuroscientist Sophie Scott on BBC Radio 4 programme 'The Infinite Monkey Cage'.

Artificial grammar learning in Williams syndrome and in typical development: The role of rules, familiarity, and prosodic cues. →

Some thoughts on a new paper about processing biases in people with Williams Syndrome on Vitor Zimmerer's website.

Outcome of the walking challenge

A bit fit  (5th in the Faculty competition) outpaced the Walking on sunshine team (10th). The more senior A bit fit team were "marginally ahead" of the doctoral student team by a small matter of 300,000 steps.