Academy of Aphasia Annual Meeting (Philadelphia, PA, USA) – October 2022
There Is No Age-Related Sentence Processing Deficit: Experimental Evidence and Implications for Aphasiology
This full-length talk integrates findings from across all three experiments I conducted as part of my PhD project, and links these findings to my postdoctoral fellowship at the Purdue Aphasia Research Lab.
Society for the Neurobiology of Language (Philadelphia, PA, USA) – October 2022
In the Prime of Life: ERP Evidence for Syntactic Comprehension Priming in Older Adults
This poster presents the full findings of the final experiment I conducted as part of my PhD, expanding on the poster presentation given at the Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta, April 2022. The presented data make the case for a general nuancing of the debate around language and aging, and the assumption that language processing ability declines as age progresses.
International Workshop on Language Learning in Older Adults (Centre for Language Development throughout the Lifespan, University of Essex) – June 2022
In the prime of life: learning of syntactic processing is intact in older adults.
2022 Cognitive Aging Conference (Georgia Institute of Technology) – April 2022
In the prime of life: Electrophysiological evidence for syntactic comprehension priming in older adults.
This poster presentation will show the results of my third and final PhD experiment, where I used ERP measures to investigate syntactic comprehension priming in older adults. I also manipulated the number of fillers presented between prime and target to examine whether syntactic priming in comprehension is as long-lived as it is in production.
CLARe5 (Corpora for Language and Aging Research) – 10th March 2022
A matter of memory? Age-invariant relative clause disambiguation and memory interference in older adults.
This talk at the CLARe5 conference on language and aging presented the findings from my second PhD experiment, where I discovered age-invariant relative clause disambiguation and memory interference. My findings support interactive processing models where constraints on the parser (including, importantly, memory effects) mutually interact, and counter the notion that language processing itself declines with age.
International Workshop on Languge and Aging – April 2021
Syntactic Representations Remain Intact in Aging: Evidence from Structural Comprehension Priming
This conference talk during the International Workshop on Language and Aging discussed the first experiment of my PhD thesis, which lends evidence to the notion that syntactic representations are unaffected by the aging process. The value of syntactic comprehension priming paradigms was also emphasised.
Psycholinguistics Research Group (University of Essex) – February 2020
A Matter of Memory – Syntax Comprehension in Mild Cognitive Impairment
This presentation of an early stage of my PhD was given to the Psycholinguistics Research Group at the University of Essex. Although the project has currently progressed to a different focus, the talk nevertheless discussed the methodological foundations of the experiments I ended up using.
UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference – July 2020
Given at the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2021, this talk built on my Masters dissertation work, and presented potential evidence against the hypothesised bilingual advantage, the idea that bilinguals show more efficient or somehow better cognitive functioning in some areas compared to monolinguals.
Willem van Boxtel 