Aphasia is a stroke-related disability of language processing that affects about one millionpeople in the United States. Human activity is so dependent on spoken communication thatimpairments of spoken language processing, such as aphasia, can be devastating. In additionto functional impairments such as inability to work, language impairments can also cause socialisolation and its consequent negative outcomes on mental and physical health. Becauselanguage processing calls on many different cognitive faculties, aphasia may have manydifferent underlying causes and each aphasic individual may have a subtly different impairment.Designing effective rehabilitation strategies depends on our understanding of the nature of theimpairment, thus, the focus of this proposal is on using behavioral experiments andcomputational modeling methods to develop a formal theory of aphasic spoken wordcomprehension. The proposed experiments will investigate phonological, semantic, andcognitive control aspects of word processing in a large and diverse set of aphasic individualsand unimpaired control participants using behavioral and eye tracking measures. Thesemeasures will provide new insights into the dynamics of word processing in aphasia.Computational modeling will be used to develop and test formal accounts of word processingdeficits in aphasia. With a better understanding of the underlying causes of aphasic languageimpairments and a formal model of aphasia, more effective rehabilitation strategies can bedeveloped.
This project will apply innovative behavioral; eye-tracking; and computational modelingtechniques to better understand word processing in aphasic patients. The investigations arelikely to contribute substantially to the understanding of language impairments in aphasia and tothe development of novel rehabilitation strategies for aphasia.
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