"Syntactic priming and language recovery in aphasia", Jiyeon Lee

Lecture in the C-STAR series, delivered by Jiyeon Lee, PhD., CCC-SLP (Purdue University) on April 4th, 2025. Dr. Lee's Aphasia Recovery Lab: https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/slhs/aphasia/ Abstract: Syntactic priming and language recovery in aphasia One of the most important and impressive things that humans can do is produce sentences effortlessly and with very few errors. Impaired sentence production is pervasive in patients with aphasia. Yet, its treatments remain scarce. In this talk, I demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit syntactic priming in improving aphasia, drawing from the measures of syntactic choices, eyetracking, connected speech, treatment efficacy, and individual differences. I argue that syntactic priming facilitates language (re-)learning in aphasia and that encoding abstract grammatical structures is an essential cognitive mechanism that supports robust and enduring aphasia recovery.