Figurative Language in Aphasic and Health Participants

描述(由申请人提供)：人们普遍认为，比喻语言从根本上组织了人类的思维和交流方式。尽管比喻语言很重要，但我们对其神经基础知之甚少，更不知道大脑损伤对其使用的影响。沟通障碍深刻地影响着患者的生活，表现为语音、语义甚至话语方面的缺陷。然而，我们对比喻语言理解的崩溃情况却知之甚少。我们假设，即使个人在脑损伤后语言缺陷得到了实质性的恢复，他们在理解非字面语言方面可能仍然存在严重的问题。我们的目标是在功能神经成像和基于患者的研究中检查隐喻，隐喻是比喻语言的一种重要形式。为了验证有关比喻语言的神经基础的假设，我们将使用当代隐喻加工的理论来激励我们的研究，并设计我们的方法来克服先前研究中的方法论局限性。我们希望在神经损伤患者中发现未被认可的沟通缺陷。鉴于隐喻在构建思维和交流中的普遍使用，这种缺陷需要得到承认。我们提出的研究将促进我们对健康和疾病中隐喻理解的认知神经科学的理解，并对中风等脑部疾病患者的康复具有指导意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is widespread agreement that figurative language fundamentally organizes how humans think and communicate. Despite the importance of figurative language, we know little about its neural underpinnings and even less about the effects of brain damage on its use. Disorders of communication profoundly affect the lives of patients as seen with deficits in phonology, semantics, and even discourse. However, we do not know very much about the breakdown in comprehension of figurative language. We hypothesize that even when individuals make substantial recoveries in language deficits following brain damage they may continue to have profound problems with understanding non-literal language. We aim to examine metaphors, a critical form of figurative language, in functional neuroimaging and patient-based studies. To test hypothesis about the neural bases for figurative language, we will use contemporary theoretical accounts of metaphor processing to motivate our studies and design our approach to overcome previous methodological limitations in this research. We expect to uncover unappreciated communication deficits in patients with neurological damage. Given the ubiquity of metaphor use in structuring thought and communication, such deficits beg to be recognized. Our proposed studies will advance our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor comprehension in health and disease and have implications for the rehabilitation of subjects with brain disorders such as stroke.