Center for Language Science at Penn State

This week, we’re excited to feature CLS faculty member Dr. Chaleece Sandberg! Dr. Sandberg is a professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Penn State.

📣 Please tell us about yourself. What first drew you to the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and what keeps you excited about it today?

🎯 When I was an undergraduate in the Linguistics program at the University of Texas at Austin, I took a “Language and the Brain” class. In it, I first learned about aphasia, a language disorder caused by acquired brain injury. I was fascinated by the fact that specific damage to the brain could cause specific language issues. As I learned more, my desire to help this population grew. What keeps me excited is continuing to learn about how language is processed in the brain and how that can serve rehabilitation practice in aphasia.

📣 How does your research connect to real-world communication challenges people face in everyday life?

🎯 Difficulty with word retrieval is a ubiquitous and frustrating problem in aphasia. My research is focused on optimizing word retrieval therapy and making optimized therapy readily available in a variety of languages.

📣 What is one thing you wish more people understood about speech, language, or hearing science?

🎯 Although 2.5 million people are currently living with aphasia, many people don’t know what it is. Aphasia is an acquired language disorder. Importantly, it does not affect intelligence. The more people know about aphasia, the more they can support the communicative needs of people with aphasia. It’s simple: acknowledge their competence, speak in short, simple sentences, reduce distractions, use gestures and writing, and confirm their message.

Congratulations to CLS alumna Jessica Vélez-Avilés, who received the Young Scholar Award at the Human Sentence Processing Conference! Jessica graduated from Penn State in 2024 with a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics and Language Science, and is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UNC Chapel Hill. To learn more about her research and current projects visit her website here: https://www.justalinguist.com/.