Podcast #7 – Vitoria Piai – How we process and create language

Our guest today is Dr. Vitoria Piai. Vitória is a senior researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognition and the Radboud University Medical Centre. 

Her research focuses on language function in healthy and neurological populations, such as stroke, brain tumor, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia or Parkinson’s.

She pays special attention to the intersection of language and other functions, such as executive control, (semantic) memory, and motor control in the case of speaking. 

She uses a bi-directional approach where she uses models from cognitive neuroscience to better understand language function in the neurological populations, while at the same time using observations of the breakdown of language in those populations as unique insights to improve the models from cognitive neuroscience.

For her work she has received multiple grants amongst which are the:

• Rubicon
• Dutch Veni grant
• Junior Principal investigator premium  

Her awards range from getting the

• Early Career Award 3x from 3 different research societies
• Top reviewer award
• The award for the “Top 10% of review contributions to the field of Psychology”

The list goes on and on. 

In this conversation we talk about the science of language. How does language work? What is language and how does it impact us every day? 

We discuss how language makes us uniquely human and where do the borders lie if there are any. We also talk about the overlaps of language and memory.