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The lab is thrilled to announce the graduation of Dr Vanessa Meitanis.
The ceremony was held on the 10th of March 2022 and celebrated her thesis: “Noun and verb processing in aphasia and healthy aging: Online behavioural and ERP investigations”. Find out more here.
We are excited to see what Dr Meitanis continues to contribute to the field.
Dr Vanessa Meitanis graduating from the lab and dressed in her doctoral robes, alongside Professor Rosemary Varley.
Our work with Therapy Box is coming along nicely. We’ve been examining prototypes of the new UTILISE therapy app and are thinking ahead to the launch of our small-scale study to test its feasibility.
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been creating some more sentences to add to our therapy tasks, so that users will have plenty of content to work through.
At Chandler House, we have a fantastic audio recording booth with a high-end microphone. Here, we can record high quality audios to use in our intervention. All three UTILISE therapy tasks use audio-taped sentences.
Pictured below are Rosemary, ready to lend her voice to the sentence constructions, and Claudia, listening closely and checking that the script programme is running smoothly.
Once all sentences are recorded, we comb through them carefully to check their quality to be sure we are left with clean, clear sound files.
The sentences we use have been carefully developed. We are practising constructions that are used frequently in day-to-day conversation. They are therefore highly functional.
Prof. Rosemary Varley, PI, ready to record some stimuli
Dr. Claudia Bruns, post-doc, running the script programme
We are looking forward to the next phase of our intervention development!
On Thursday the 31st of March, 2022, our UTILISE project PI, Professor Rosemary Varley, will be giving a talk at the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) “Therapy Talks” event.
Professor Varley will give an overview of the usage-based Construction Grammar that informs our novel intervention for sentence processing in post-stroke aphasia, and discuss why it is a useful framework for speech and language therapy.
Construction Grammar argues that constructions are the fundamental building blocks of language. Constructions can be fixed, ‘concrete’ words or phrases that are used often and stored in memory as whole chunks, or more abstract ‘skeletons’ which leave room for different lexical items to fit into ‘open slots’.
We are very much looking forward to this opportunity to share our work with clinicians in the field. For more information on the other expert speakers invited to present that day, and to book a ticket, check out the event page here.
At UTILISE we are comitted to contributing to the scientific knowledge base. We also believe it is important to foster an environment where existing and aspiring researchers can learn, explore their areas of interest, and develop useful, transferrable skills for future projects that will further broaden the horizons of aphasia research. So, the team has expanded by two! We would love to introduce you to our interns; Ariel and Sonia.
Ziqian Xu - Ariel
I'm an intern in the UTILISE Project. I'm currently studying psychology and language sciences as an undergraduate at UCL.
I'm interested in the neural mechanisms of syntactic and semantic integration, visual attention, and number sense.
Sonia Mariotti
I recently graduated from the MSc Language Sciences (Neuroscience, Language and Communication) at UCL. I have a keen interest in acquired communication difficulties in older adults. I researched discourse production in aphasia under the supervision of Rosemary Varley. My project employed topic modelling to investigate the relationship between micro and macrolinguistic levels of language processing within a usage-based framework.
I previously studied Linguistics and Language Teaching in my BA at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
We are thrilled to announce that we are extending our UTILISE timeline!
After COVID-19 put our project on pause for more than a year, we were very excited to re-start in late 2021, at which point we had an expected end-date of October 2022.
However, we are now able to confirm that we will run until March 2023!
We are very grateful to our funder, The Stroke Association, for agreeing to extend our no-cost extension request.
This means we will be able to recruit more participants and collect more data.
Aphasia affects more than 350,000 people in the UK, so, it is incredibly important that we learn more about how to help people with aphasia to rebuild their language abilities. Lots of research has looked at rehabilitation on the single-word level. We are investigating sentence-level rehabilitation using a usage-based Construction Grammar framework (learn more here).
When it comes to therapy trials, the bigger the better! So, if you, or someone you know, might be interested in taking part, please contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone to discuss what taking part would involve.
We’re in full swing here on the UTILISE project!
Claudia and Fern can be found in Chandler House every day now, running therapy sessions and processing lots of data. Even though we’re nice and busy, we are on the look-out for new recruits!
The study is for people who have aphasia, following a stroke, who have difficulties understanding and producing sentences. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, then we need you!
Check out our aphasia-friendly video here for more information about what the study involves.
Our novel computer therapy program is designed to be high-dose, running 3 times a week over 4 weeks (12 sessions). The therapy phase has 3 tasks:
“Listen - Same or Different?”
“Listen - Be Quick!” and,
“Speak - Say Sentences”.
We are also looking for people to have MRI brain scans with us, so we can learn more about who may benefit from this therapy and whether the intervention can even change patterns of brain activity. Don’t worry, you do not have to have the brain scans to take part in the therapy.
If you are interested and would like to know more then check out our webpage for more information.
We would love to hear from you, so contact Fern or Claudia by email or telephone today.
Happy New Year, 2022!
After receiving a Therapeutic Accelerator Scheme award, we are excited to share the news of our collaboration with Therapy Box. The Therapy Box team are working with us to develop our therapy software into an app, to improve user experience and enable remote therapy delivery. We hope that this will make UTILISE more widely available in the future, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months. Read more about Therapy Box and their terrific work here.
We have started the year with a bang and are busy with participant testing / therapy sessions and brain scanning, as well as working with interns and supporting two MSc project students.
Read more about our project here.
Wishing all participants and supporters of the UTILISE project Happy Holidays.
Since re-launching our project we have been busy recruiting volunteers. We are looking forward to meeting some new faces in the New Year.
The study will run until October 2022, so please do get in touch if you are interested to learn more about our project and how to take part.
This year:
o We…
Read moreWe are ready to welcome back participants taking part in our sentence therapy. Read more about the project here, or watch our aphasia-friendly video about the project.
We are delighted that the Stroke Association has extended the timeline of our project to October 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to sign up to this study if you are interested. We are looking for volunteers who have aphasia following a stroke at least 6 months ago, who are right handed (before the stroke) and who have difficulties understanding sentences and speaking.
Read moreOur ‘Letter to the Editor’ commenting on the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown measures on physical activity levels and, subsequently, stroke, has been accepted by Disability and Rehabilitation. It is well documented that physical activity is a primary modifiable risk factor in stroke prevention and that higher activity levels pre-stroke can lower risk of mortality and complications. We postulate that ‘lockdown’ measures implemented to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, may inhibit physical activity levels and thus impact stroke rates and outcomes.
Find the full text here:
Rodgers, F., Varley, R., Khatoonabadi, A. & Javadi, A. H. (2020). Physical inactivity during lockdown and the implications for incidence of stroke, severity, mortality, reoccurrence and rehabilitation. Disability and Rehabilitation. DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2020.1820588.
UCL Cognition and Grammar Lab