History of the Conference

For more than a decade, the Eleanor M. Saffran Cognitive Neuroscience Conference (hereafter, the Saffran Conference) has aimed to provide a forum in which researchers and clinicians with a common interest in language and other cognitive disorders can begin to bridge the gap between basic science and clinical practice. Practical differences between clinicians and researchers can impact the translation of theories and rehabilitation research and the implementation of laboratory-developed diagnostic and treatment protocols in clinical practice. There are two important stages to the implementation process that can be achieved in the context of this conference: (1) Providing education about current theories and practices that are emerging from rehabilitation research and (2) Providing a forum for clinicians and researchers to address the practical considerations involved in translating laboratory developed diagnostic and treatment protocols to clinical practice. The educational component of this two-stage process has been and will continue to be an important contribution of the Saffran conference. 

The conference is typically divided into two sessions, one devoted to the theoretical research on a particular topic (e.g., the cognitive and neural foundations of sentence processing) and the other devoted to current rehabilitation approaches that are in various stages of development. (e.g., verb-network strengthening treatment, Edmonds, Nadeau & Kiran, 2009). The audience is comprised primarily of these groups: clinicians, researchers and educators in disciplines related to the study of communication disorders (e.g., speech/language pathologists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, linguists) and students from these disciplines, many of whom will be future researchers and/or clinical practitioners.