The mission of the proposed Program Project shall be to foster excellence in research focusing on the rehabilitation of language and related disorders resulting from acquired brain impairment. The Program Project contains four Subprojects and two Core Units. The four Subprojects are designed to develop and study the efficacy of theoretically motivated, behavioral treatments for specified cognitive deficits associated with aphasia using multiple replications of within subject, experimental design, experimental designs. The cognitive deficits targeted for study include agrammatisms, anomia, aprosodia, and attention disorders associated with aphasia. In addition, it is our interest to embed this research into biological underpinnings in two ways. First, predictions about the efficacy of choices of treatment strategy (restitutive versus vicariative/substitutive) in a portion of the Subprojects involve an interpretation at the cellular level of the physiology of the recovering system at different points in the recovery process (acute versus chronic). Second, we plan to study the nature of biological changes in the processing system that result from these experimental behavioral interventions by studying a portion of the experimental subjects using pre- and post-treatment fMRI. Finally, the impact that these behavioral treatment may have on the quality of the lives of participants (including their caregivers) will be monitored via a variety of methods.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 28 publications
