26.10.2016How Speakers find the right word at the right time: Word finding and Word finding Difficulties in Healthy and Aphasic Speakers

Prof Dr. Eva Belke, Empirical and Simulative Psycholinguistics, Institute for Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

When speakers talk about things in the world, they must retrieve the correct denotation for these things from their mental lexicon, the inventory of their known words and meanings. This is not an easy task, because there is usually no link between an object’s appearance and properties and its name – for example, why is a hat a “hat” and why call a bag a “bag”? Professor Eva Belke will show how healthy speakers can bridge the gap between things and their names in a way that allows for a quick and largely faultless retrieval of words. Prof. Belke will conclude with diagnostic and therapeutic implications, which result from the findings discussed in her lecture.