Functional Imaging in Childhood Language Impairment

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The proposed research training will develop research skills in functional neuroimaging by applying knowledge obtained during coursework (Fall, 2000) in two supervised projects (paradigm development and application of the paradigm to children with SLI) and to plan for future research applying fMRI to the study of specific language impairment in children. The long-term goal is to apply structural and functional neuroimaging to gain an understanding of the neurobiology underlying speech-language processing and other basic processes (e.g., attention) in children with SLI and to determine the underlying impact of intervention. The proposed research activity for the first year will be to develop an fMRI cue-target delay paradigm to examine orienting in auditory and visual modalities for typically developing children. The second year will be devoted to a mentored project in which this paradigm will be applied to children with SLI who are age-matched to the typically developing children from the study conducted during the previous year.