Sunday, September 14, 2025, 10:30 - 11:00 am, Elstad Auditorium
Join the SNL Board of Directors for the Annual Business Meeting. SNL leadership will review what the Society has accomplished in 2025 and discuss the outlook and priorities for 2026. The Business Meeting is an opportunity for SNL members to ask questions of the SNL Board and bring up issues of concern to the general membership.
You may send questions before the start of the Business Meeting to .
Gallaudet University offers several convenient food options for conference attendees. On campus, the Marketplace in the JSAC (Jordan Student Academic Center) provides cafeteria-style dining with a variety of hot meals, sandwiches, salads, and beverages. Just a 5-minute walk east of campus, Union Market offers a vibrant selection of local food vendors, coffee shops, and eateries featuring global cuisine in a lively, communal setting. For quick snacks, drinks, and sundries, the Gallaudet Bookstore—also located in the JSAC—offers a range of options.
Plaza Dining Hall (Hanson Plaza) - All-you-can-eat facility
Marketplace Café (Lower Level, JSAC)
Java Corner - Serving Starbucks® coffee, espresso beverages, and grab-and-go items
Rathskeller Pub (Lower Level, JSAC) - Student-run pub offering a la carte dining and pub-style menu options
The Hangout on 2 - Bar with handcrafted culinary delights and crafted cocktails that change with the season.
We are excited to have the 2024 Early Career Award recipient, Adolfo M. Garcia, who was unable to attend the 2024 meeting in Brisbane as a speaker this year in Washington D.C.
The 2024 Early Career Award was generously sponsored by Brain and Language
Sunday, September 14, 2025, 10:00 - 10:30 am, Elstad Auditorium
Speaker: Adolfo M. García, 1 Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2 Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA and Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 3 Departamento de Lingüística y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
About Dr. Adolfo M. García
Adolfo García received his Ph.D. in Language Science in 2014 from Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina), after which he did a postdoc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology (Argentina), and a fellowship on Brain Health at Global Brain Health Institute (UCSF, US). He specializes in the neuroscience of language, focusing on language embodiment, bilingualism, and speech biomarkers of brain health. Currently, he serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center at Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) and Associate Researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Chile).
Adolfo has examined how sensorimotor brain systems contribute to speech and language processes using multiple methodologies, including automated speech and language analysis and experimental paradigms in combination with MRI, fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, and tDCS. He has provided spatiotemporal insights into the role of motor (e.g., frontostriatal) circuits in action-verb production and comprehension, face-recognition (e.g., right fusiform) regions in processing face-related nouns, and cerebello-cortical networks in processing social concepts. His research on bilinguals has revealed neurocognitive effects of age of language acquisition, language proficiency, and interpreting experience. As a creator of TELL, a speech testing app, he has also established speech markers of diverse brain diseases, including reduced semantic granularity in temporo-hippocampal atrophy models; and dysarthric patterns, atypical morphological choices, and altered action verb processing in frontostriatal atrophy models. He is also a co-founder of Include (a global network for crosslinguistic research on brain health), and Co-Principal Investigator of an NIH-funded project on speech biomarkers of dementia in both Latino and English-speaking individuals.
Abstract
Speech and language measures are crucial for neurodegeneration research. These assessments reveal deficits linked to disorder-specific brain atrophy and connectivity patterns, informing neurolinguistic models and clinical testing. Yet, the field is undermined by low scalability (with growingly uneven clinician-to-patient ratios), limited implementation (as scientific discoveries rarely evolve to clinical application), and soaring inequity (as highly vulnerable populations are understudied). Here I will introduce our team’s decade-long framework to tackle these challenges. First, I will describe our progress in automated speech and language analysis (ASLA), including mappings of speech timing alterations to superior/inferior frontal atrophy in non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia, reduced semantic granularity to temporo-hippocampal alterations in Alzheimer’s disease, and abnormal conceptual processing to frontostriatal disturbances in Parkinson’s disease. Second, I will introduce our Toolkit to Examine Lifelike Language (TELL), a web-based app that turns ASLA into a clinical resource, offering real-time markers of motor speech, semantic memory, episodic memory, and emotional processing. Third, I will present our efforts to foster equity in language-based brain health research, including large cross-cultural projects (linking high- and low/middle-income countries) and the Include network (integrating 80 sites across five continents for cross-linguistic studies). In brief, through this work, we aim to foster a scalable glocal philosophy to translational neurolinguistics.
The Society adopts the definition of "underrepresented in the scientific workforce" used by the US National Institutes of Health until 2025. Briefly, this includes: