Roxana Botezatu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
University of Missouri
Graph Structure Analysis of Spontaneous Speech Production Among Bilingual and Clinical Populations
In the last decade, graph theory has been widely employed in the study of natural phenomena. In this talk, I discuss the use of graph structure analysis to characterize discourse production among bilingual and clinical populations. I present evidence from college-aged learners of a second language, older adults with dementia and adults with post-stroke aphasia to suggest that measures of connectivity in spontaneous speech may be used to predict second language proficiency in bilinguals, but also symptom severity among clinical populations. This approach provides an alternative to verbal fluency and confrontation naming for assessing language abilities in clinical populations.