Language impairments have always been the objective of the research of Nadine Martin, director at the Eleanor M Saffran Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She began studying the more theoretical aspect of language processing but in recent years has proposed to transfer this knowledge to improve diagnosis and treatment in patients with aphasia. She explained it at a conference under the IDIBELL seminar series on March 9.

“Initially aphasia began to be treated as a language problem, where it had been lost the representations of words in the brain and were therefore unrecoverable” explained Martin, “but in recent years we have seen that the problem is access to this information. There are many evidences of this; we have achieved in many cases that patients can access these representations and remember the words. So the words are there.”

Nadine Martin’s research focuses on the relationship between word processing and short-term memory and implications for rehabilitation of disorders of the word recovery. In fact, she has developed a protocol to work directly on the short-term memory with several test is doing to improve aphasia patients.

“The great value of cognitive models is that they are easily transferable to the clinical application” said Nadine Martin, who believes that cognitive models are about “behaviors in language and speech and therefore they use the same language that treatments “.