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At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury.
Speech rehabilitation experts can predict how well a patient will recover from aphasia, a disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for producing language.
The Transcript
How do you communicate abstract research concepts in four minutes or less to an audience without any scientific training? If you ask Felice Amato, a Boston University College of Fine Arts assistant professor of art education and creator of the class Thinking Through Puppets, it’s all about “crafting metaphor.” In her class, undergraduates teamed up with master’s and PhD students from across BU to convey the graduate students’ research through puppetry performance, culminating in an end-of-semester “puppet slam” showcase, which was held on April 23.
Over the course of the semester, the puppetry students met with five BU graduate researchers and learned about their dissertation work, on topics including civil forfeiture, anthropomorphism in 20th-century literature, protein folding and its relation to disease, American Sign Language learning for deaf and hard-of-hearing babies, and reentry employment counseling for formerly incarcerated people.