Edgar Zurif - US grants

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.

The broad purpose of the proposed research is to contribute to the understanding of cognitive aging in terms of the elemental processing systems that serve language :comprehension. For both young and healthy elderly adults, the research will focus on the temporal parameters of information access for isolated words; on the manner by which information provided by sentence context interacts in real-time with word meaning activation; on real-time syntactic analysis; and on real-time inference formation at the level of discourse. The research will also examine if increased memory loads differentially affect processing at the syntactic and discourse levels and if young and healthy elderly adults fare differently in the face of increased memory loads at each of these two levels. This program of research should yield information of potential relevance to the formation of screening devices for distinguishing early signs of pathological aging from normal age-related changes, allowing an assessment of subtle alterations to processing resources, before they become evident in every-day behavior.

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 is 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 is 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.

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 is 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 is 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.