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

What does it take to understand complicated auditory patterns such as speech? It is something we all take for granted, but if you think about it. the result is quite magical.  Aphasia is the loss of ability to understand of express epeech.  What is missing when we are afflicted with aphasia, and why does it affect our speech perception?
I'm happy that Jill Kries is now at Stanford and she will be talking about her research to use EEG recordings to understand how we perceive speech. She does this by comparing speech processing by people with and without aphasia.

Who: Dr. Jill Kries (Stanford)
What:  Speech and language encoding in aging and aphasia
When: Friday January 17, 2025 at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, Top Floor of the Knoll
Why: How the heck do we understand these weird patterns, and what does aphasia tell us?

Come to CCRMA and I'm sure that Jill's weird sound patterns will all be perfectly understandable!  

- Malcolm

Speech and language encoding in aging and aphasia
Jill Kries (Stanford)

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