Katerina Drakoulaki

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | uoa · Department of Linguistics

Music is something that people turn to for solace, comfort, and reminiscence in times of crisis. This project harnesses an unusual situation created by the global coronavirus pandemic to provide an opportunity to reflect on how our favourite music can be beneficial to us. This study provides a DIY toolkit to identify, listen to, and reflect on your favourite music and tell us about its importance in your life: available in English, Italian, Spanish and Greek.

Although recent research has shown that successful interpretation of ambiguous sentences is linked to conflict-resolution skills, very little is known about the nature of the cognitive control abilities contributing to ambiguity resolution. Moreover, there is limited research on how ambiguity is resolved in clinical populations and how cognitive treatment assists sentence comprehension in these populations. The main goal of the proposed research is to investigate the cognitive control mechanisms that underlie the comprehension of ambiguity in language, with special attention paid to the performance of clinical populations with severe impairments in language and/or cognitive control skills (i.e. executive functions (EFs)). The specific objectives of the study are: (a) To investigate the contribution of EFs to the syntactic ambiguity resolution performance of both typical and atypical adolescents and adults. (b) To investigate the long-term benefits of behavioral cognitive treatment to different clinical groups in enhancing their linguistic abilities. Βehavioral and eye-tracking tasks will investigate syntactic ambiguity resolution and non-verbal EFs in (a) 20 adolescents diagnosed with high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders, (b) 20 adolescents diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment, (c) 20 individuals diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia, (d) 40 neuro-typical adolescents and (e) 20 language-unimpaired adults. Source of funding: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, Greece. Duration: 2019 – 2022. The project proposal ranked 6th out of 144 proposals in Arts & Humanities in the 2018 Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers in Greece.

This project is a side project aimed at non-experts and children, to bring science into the Greek speaking community. Specifically, I aim to create a selection of comprehensive neuroscience articles. These articles are previously published in the journal "Frontiers in Young Minds".