Heather Dial, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Houston
Assessment and Intervention in Stroke-induced and Primary Progressive Aphasia
In the first part of my talk, I will present on relatively recent work on lexical retrieval intervention in primary progressive aphasia. Specifically, I will discuss outcomes for in-person vs. remotely delivered treatment and neural correlates of treatment-induced gains in semantic variant PPA. I will then transition to present on assessment of speech perception and language comprehension in primary progressive aphasia using a continuous speech task. In this task, individuals listen to an audiobook while electroencephalography responses are recorded. Temporal response function (TRF) modeling is then used to examine neural processing of different acoustic and linguistic features of the speech stimulus. Findings from individuals with primary progressive aphasia relative to age-matched control participants will be discussed. Future directions examining reliability and validity of TRF modeling in young adults and individuals with stroke-induced aphasia will also be presented.
Funding: This work was supported by an NIH/NIDCD NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship F32DC016812 (awarded to Heather Dial), University of Houston Faculty research startup (awarded to Heather Dial), NIDCD R01DC016291 (awarded to Maya Henry), and NIDCD R01DC013315 (awarded to Bharath Chandrasekaran).