Functional Imaging in Childhood Language Impairment

拟议的研究培训将通过将在课程作业(2000年秋季)中获得的知识应用于两个有监督的项目(范例开发和范例在SLI儿童中的应用)来发展功能神经成像的研究技能，并计划未来将功能磁共振应用于儿童特定语言障碍的研究。长期目标是应用结构和功能神经成像，以了解SLI儿童言语语言处理和其他基本过程(如注意力)的神经生物学基础，并确定干预的潜在影响。第一年的拟议研究活动将是开发一种功能磁共振线索-目标延迟范式，以检查典型发育儿童的听觉和视觉形态的定向。第二年将专门用于一个有指导的项目，在该项目中，这一范式将应用于患有SLI的儿童，这些儿童的年龄与前一年进行的研究中典型的发育儿童相匹配。

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.