CBR Seminar Series: Kelly Martin
CBR Seminar Series: Kelly Martin, August 14, 2023
Title: Language system plasticity in healthy development and after perinatal stroke
Abstract:
In the current talk, I will discuss my dissertation work which examined the cortical organization of language processing to evaluate which features may or may not be essential for a fully intact language system. In the first study we investigated whether the right hemisphere areas that are active for language processing early in life still exhibit a weak but spatially intact response during language processing in neurologically healthy adults. Two additional studies used data from the Pediatric Stroke Research Project, a comprehensive study of language and other cognitive abilities in participants with perinatal strokes as well as in their healthy siblings. In these studies we investigated how the language system becomes mapped in an alternative functional layout in the right hemisphere after left hemisphere perinatal stroke, and how this mapping allows emotional prosody processing and sentence comprehension–functions ordinarily subserved by different hemispheres–to develop in the perisylvian regions of the uninjured hemisphere. Collectively, these findings have important implications for the principles of development of functional localization and plasticity in higher cognitive functions after cortical injury.
Bio:
Education
BA in Neuroscience from Boston University in 2014
PhD. 2022 Georgetown University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience
Predoctoral training fellowship from the Center for Neural Injury and Repair, Georgetown University
Postdoctoral fellow in Peter Turkeltaub’s Cognitive Recovery Lab