GRANTS. Charlotta Saldert, associate professor at the Division of Speech and Language Pathology, has received SEK 3.7 million from the Swedish Research Council for her project on difficulties finding words that is related to diseases such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease and MS. She is the only Sahlgrenska Academy researcher to receive funds via the Swedish Research Council’s call for applications in humanities and social sciences.
In this project, Charlotta Saldert and her colleagues are primarily studying the presence of word-finding difficulties (anomia) with different types of neurological diseases, such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease and MS. They will also evaluate the effect of a training method for improving word-finding ability. The project studies how trouble finding words looks qualitatively in different patient groups and how different people handle their word-finding difficulties, partly in a test situation, and also in everyday conversations.
“Doing this requires us to be rooted in linguistic and sociological theoretical frameworks and to use methods that are more common in the humanities than in the medical field,” says Charlotta Saldert, and concludes that speech and language pathology is an interdisciplinary research area.
Charlotta Saldert also received funding for the project from Forte earlier this year, and the new grant from the Swedish Research Council will allow for an increase in the number of participants and patient groups.
“I think it’s going to be especially exciting to take a closer look at how anomia manifests in the various groups and how different people with anomia actually handle their word-finding difficulties when trying to express themselves. We don’t know very much about this yet, and this knowledge is also important for the treatment and care of these groups,” says Charlotta Saldert.
Charlotta Saldert’s project is called “Finding the correct words with neurogenic communication disorders: naming objects and activities, communicative strategies in conversations and effects of word-finding training”. She has received a grant of SEK 3,694,200 from the Swedish Research Council.
