Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension

这项研究的长期目标是了解句子中失语障碍的性质 理解，尤其是使用句法结构来确定句子的意义，以及理解的方式 参与句子理解的过程是在大脑中组织的。这个项目将检查失语症 单次中风患者使用不同句法结构来确定各方面的能力 句子的意义，测试他们在一些任务中的使用情况。这些行为研究的结果将是 详细描述患者能理解什么，以及S/他如何处理S/他所听到的句法结构 它们(在线处理)以及句子何时结束(离线处理)。我们将获得核磁共振图像 患者大脑区域的结构和灌注量，并将确定受 中风，使用现代分析方法。然后我们将寻找病变大小占主导地位的大脑区域 对于大量的性能差异。在研究过程中，我们将提供数据 关于句子理解障碍的行为性质的问题(例如 个别患者是否丧失了完成特定句法操作的能力，或者他们的 最好将困难视为由于病理性限制其完成手术的能力 一般，这首先影响更复杂的结构)，以及关于神经问题，如是否方面的 句子理解过程在所有个体的大脑中总是位于相同的区域。结果是 可能会对我们如何看待这些障碍和神经组织产生重要的影响 支持这些功能。

The long term objective of the research is to understand the nature of aphasic impairments in sentence comprehension, in particular the use of syntactic structure to determine sentence meaning, and the way the processes involved in sentence comprehension are organized in the brain. This project will examine aphasic patients with single strokes for their abilities to use differentsyntactic structures to determine aspects of sentence meaning, testing their use in a number of tasks. The result of these behavioral studies will be a detailed picture of what a patient can understand, and how s/he processes syntactic structures as s/he hears them (on-line processing) as well as when a sentence is over (off-line processing). We will obtain MR images of the structure and perfusion of regions of the patients' brains, and will identify the areas affected by the stroke, using modem analysis methods. Wewill then look for the brain regions in which lesion size accounts for significant amounts of the variance in performance. In the course of the research, we will provide data regarding both questions about the behavioral natureof sentence comprehension impairments (such as whether individual patients lose the ability to accomplish particular syntactic operations or whether their difficulties are best viewed as due to pathological limitations in their ability to accomplish operations in general, which affect more complex structures first), and about neural issues, such as whether aspects of the sentence comprehension process are always located in the same brain regions in all individuals. The results could have important consequences for howwe think of these disorders and the neural organization that supports these functions.