Cognitive and Linguistics Outcomes in Children with Cochlear Implants: Perspectives on Neural and Environmental Mechanisms.
Saturday, September 13, 3:00 - 5:00 pm, Elstad Auditorium
Organizer: David Corina1; 1University of California, Davis
Congenitally deaf children who receive cochlear implants early in life often make great strides in language acquisition, though the determinates of successful linguistic competencies remain poorly understood and a wide variability of language and cognitive outcomes remain. A core issue of what constitutes the “best practices” for raising deaf children has a long contentious history in the Deaf community, in education and in clinical practice. Community stakeholders and professionals who live, work and research in this dynamic intersectionality are often polarized and hold strong and entrenched ideological beliefs. This symposium presents novel research which explores the role of neural plasticity and language exposure as factors underlying observed outcomes. Against a backdrop of technologically driven audiological interventions, novel tools for structural and neuro-functional assessments of deaf children, and a broader understanding of the determinants of signed and spoken language acquisition (and associated behaviors, such as reading) this symposium aims to provide the audience with a balanced and thoughtful conversation. View Talks
Beyond core language: Prosody and pragmatics
Sunday, September 14, 3:45 - 5:45 pm, Elstad Auditorium
Organizers: Anna Greenwald1; 1Georgetown University Medical Center
Since the days of Broca and Wernicke, “language” has been associated predominantly with the brain’s left hemisphere. Challenging this one-sided view, this symposium will highlight aspects of language for which the right hemisphere plays an equally important and possibly dominant role: pragmatics, with a particular focus on prosody. How and in which context something is said holds crucial cues regarding the meaning of what is said, and a failure to account for this can have devastating effects on communication (and sometimes, research design). Speakers with backgrounds in linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and speech-language-pathology will illuminate this topic from different angles, covering the spectrum from basic to clinical in individual talks, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience. This symposium should be of broad interest to SNL attendees of all training backgrounds and at all career levels, and we hope that it will inspire many future collaborations. View Talks