Thursday, April 25th, 12pm ET (4pm UTC)
Presentation in Zoom, accessible via the C-STAR website:
http://cstar.sc.edu/lecture-series/

The neurocognition of developmental language disorder

Michael Ullman, PhD
Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder with adverse impacts that continue into adulthood. In this talk I will give an overview of the neurocognition of DLD, including a summary of the language and cognitive abilities that are generally impacted in the disorder, and findings from a recently published neuroanatomical meta-analysis of DLD. I will discuss explanatory accounts of DLD, with a focus on a neuroanatomical account—the Procedural circuit Deficit Hypothesis (PDH)—which posits that DLD can be largely explained by abnormalities of the basal ganglia. As we will see, converging language, cognitive, and neurobiological evidence lends support to this perspective, which appears to have greater explanatory power than linguistic, cognitive, or genetic accounts of DLD. I will discuss future directions, including both diagnostic and therapeutic implications. Finally, I will briefly discuss the PDH as a potential explanatory account for other neurodevelopmental disorders, some of which are often comorbid with DLD.
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The online lecture can be followed online from your computer, tablet or smartphone, in Zoom. The zoom link is accessible via the C-STAR website: http://cstar.sc.edu/lecture-series/

The watch-party for the online lecture will be in Discovery, room #140 (915 Greene Street, Columbia, SC)

For more information, or to be added to the C-STAR mailing list, contact Dirk den Ouden: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Clinical Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics