Funding is requested for a project designed to explore the nature of the comprehension limitations in Broca's & Wernicke's aphasia and to discover which grammatical structures and which processing components are implicated in these limitations. The objective of this work is to advance an understanding of the manner in which language is organized in the brain, and in particular, to determine whether the effects of focal brain damage honor distinctions among amodal linguistic information types (syntax and semantics). Special attention will be paid to the possibility that aphasic phenomena are not all linguistically specific in nature, but rather, that they are, in part, the reflection of disruptions to domain-neutral processing components--that is, to processing components which, although recruited by the language system, are themselves not specific to it. This last possibility will be assessed by focusing on the role of automaticity of processing and its relation to memory search in both the verbal and nonverbal domains. This program of research should yield information of relevance to remediation in aphasia, allowing an examination of the extent to which the therapeutic effort should be focused upon particular language capacities and the extent to which it should be expanded to deal with information processing on a wider scale.
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