LANGUAGE

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The comprehension and production of language, common and effortless in everyday life, require the coordination of multiple linguistic and cognitive processes with millisecond accuracy. Some of these language components include speech perception, echoic verbal memory, lexical-storage, lexical retrieval, associating words with related words and concepts, applying grammatical rules, finding phonemic representations for words, and planning and executing articulator movements. New technologies support the investigation of the precise neural structures that support these components and the time course of their interactions with ever-greater precision. The goal of this project is to investigate the brain areas involved in three components of language for which our previous work has isolated brain regions that appear to contribute to these functions: articulation, lexical semantics, and executive control of language processing. In the proposed study, we will investigate the specific functional roles of these brain areas, the time course with which they are recruited into the language system, the ways in which these areas interact with each other, and how they interact with other areas that support the cognitive skills necessary for language (e.g., memory and executive functioning). Our proposal uses three technologies available to us in our group, lesion analysis, functional NMI, and event related potentials. Lesion analysis will be used to correlate components of language behavior of aphasic patients who exhibit deficits with the specific brain regions affected. Because lesion analysis isolates the area that disrupts a particular function, but does not specify its role in real-time processing, functional MRI experiments will parallel the tasks used with aphasic patients but will investigate the functional roles of these areas in language use by normal subjects. ERP studies will be used to examine the time course of lexical selection and executive control processes to determine the points at which they enter into language use and when they interact with other cognitive functions. Together, this rare combination of techniques will teach us more about the brain areas involved in speech and language, their functional contributions, and the time course of their involvement.