The proposed research investigates areas of the brain that adapt in order to associate actions with temporal sound patterns. The development of action-sound associations is essential for behaviorally relevant sound mappings, including production and perception of speech and music. Neural plasticity will be compared across groups with and without lesions (both real and rTMS induced """"""""virtual"""""""" lesions) to left ventral prefrontal cortex (PFCv) to examine short and long-term plasticity in brain regions associated with language recovery from Broca's aphasia. Three proposed experiments, using complimentary research techniques - fMRI and rTMS, test hypotheses concerning a learned somatotopic mapping in premotor cortex for processing meaningful temporal structures, and the effect of re-mapping action to non-verbal sound on clinical language recovery. Neuroimaging measurements will be collected from participants as they discriminate between sequences of sine tones before and after training new associations between hand movements and the sound patterns. Findings will be relevant to the development of recovery methods for victims of stroke and to fundamental issues in brain adaptation for sensory-action pairings.
