CBR Seminar Series: Jet Vonk, 11/17/25

Language offers a uniquely sensitive window into brain health, yet traditional approaches to its assessment have been manual, slow, and dependent on specialized expertise. This talk will discuss how automated speech and language analysis can quantify subtle linguistic and acoustic changes in aging and dementia, enabling scalable, low-burden tools for early detection, differential diagnosis, and longitudinal monitoring. Drawing from studies in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, including primary progressive aphasia, this talk will illustrate how computational approaches can expand linguistic theory and clinical knowledge into practical, reproducible markers of neurodegeneration.