Swathi Kiran
Boston University, MA·Neuroscience
People who speak two languages vary widely in how well they handle each one. Strokes and dementia can disrupt those abilities in very different ways.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
bilingualism
aphasia
semantic dementia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Characterize the lexical and semantic impairments observed in bilingual post-stroke aphasia and bilingual semantic dementia, and explain how they arise, using the BILEX computational model's maps and connections.
- Extend BILEX simulations over time to explain how bilingual language abilities recover after stroke and decline in dementia, accounting for age of acquisition, language use and exposure.
- Add subcortical conditional routing mechanisms to BILEX to model how bilingual speakers select and control their languages, and how interference arises in neurological disorders.
More about the research
Cases of both conditions are rising, and the US Hispanic population, many of them Spanish-English bilinguals, is growing and aging. That makes it urgent to understand how bilingual language breaks down and recovers. Capturing all of this variation directly would require studying hundreds of patients over time, which is impractical. This project instead proposes computer simulations of the bilingual language system.
Why it matters
Spanish-English bilingual older adults with stroke-related aphasia or dementia need language assessment and therapy matched to how their two languages are affected. Mechanistic models of impairment, recovery and decline could help guide future treatments for these growing patient populations, including cases for which no patient data yet exist.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Graves
Rutgers University-Newark, NJ·Psychology
Develop neural network accounts of post-stroke dyslexias by lesioning a model that links spelling, sound and meaning, then re-training it to simulate damage and recovery in groups and individual patients.
Maria V. Ivanova
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether high-intensity exercise improves language, cognition, movement and emotional well-being in 110 stroke survivors with aphasia, compared with a matched low-intensity exercise control in a randomized trial.
Eleonora Rossi
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
Test whether the composition and structure of heritage Spanish speakers' personal social networks, mapped through network interviews, predict their written and oral fluency in Spanish and English.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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