The broad purpose of the proposed research program is to investigate the nature and neurological organization of the capacity for understanding natural language sentences. The research will focus on the interface between syntactic and conceptual representations. It will examine the real-time operations involved in combining lexical conceptual content into contextualized interpretations; and it will examine the effects of variously sited focal brain damage on these operations.
One aim i s to determine if combinatorial meaning the combination of word meanings in a sentence is directed not only by the syntactic arrangement of the words in that sentence, but also by non-syntactic, generative lexical operations.
A second aim i s to determine if these two kinds of combinatorial processes can be dissociated by brain damage. This work will use reaction-time paradigms as an on-line means of studying these sentence comprehension operations. This program of research should yield information of relevance to remediation in aphasia. It should specify the kinds of real-time processing limitations that therapeutic efforts must address.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
7R01DC003660-04
Application #
6523454
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-CMS (01))
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
1999-09-29
Project End
2004-08-31
Budget Start
2002-09-01
Budget End
2003-08-31
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2002
Total Cost
$267,021
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California San Diego
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
077758407
City
La Jolla
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92093
Love, Tracy; Swinney, David; Walenski, Matthew et al. (2008) How left inferior frontal cortex participates in syntactic processing: Evidence from aphasia. Brain Lang 107:203-19
Pinango, Maria Mercedes; Winnick, Aaron; Ullah, Rashad et al. (2006) Time-course of semantic composition: the case of aspectual coercion. J Psycholinguist Res 35:233-44
Jackendoff, Ray; Lerdahl, Fred (2006) The capacity for music: what is it, and what's special about it? Cognition 100:33-72
Pinker, Steven; Jackendoff, Ray (2005) The faculty of language: what's special about it? Cognition 95:201-36
Drai, D; Grodzinsky, Y; Zurif, E (2001) Broca's aphasia is associated with a single pattern of comprehension performance: a reply. Brain Lang 76:185-92
Zurif, E B (2001) More on sentence comprehension in Broca's aphasia: a response to Caplan. Brain Lang 79:321-8; discussion 329-32
Pinango, M M; Zurif, E B (2001) Semantic operations in aphasic comprehension: implications for the cortical organization of language. Brain Lang 79:297-308