Psycholinguistic Analysis of Aphasic Syndromes

描述（由申请人提供）：获得性失语症是由于中风或其他脑部损伤而导致的语言丧失。这是一种慢性残疾，影响着100多万美国成年人，剥夺了每个人表达语言能力的能力。失语症的异质表现对这种破坏性疾病的诊断、测量和治疗提出了挑战。这个长期资助项目致力于从理论角度解释失语症的许多方面。它的方法和模型催生了评估和治疗失语症的新形式，并为临床试验和康复研究基础设施提供了分支资助。该项目的持续目标是根据心理语言处理模型来解释失语障碍，并通过使用计算方法来完善这些模型。这一建议增加了一个新的目标：通过将生产障碍的心理语言学描述与最先进的损伤分析方法相结合，进一步了解脑语言关系。该提案分为两部分。第1部分使用过去工作中开发的数据和模型推进了对单字生成障碍的理解。第1部分开发的产品将促进临床医生和研究人员访问我们的方法和数据。第二部分侧重于竞争性词语选择的调节，以及这种调节障碍如何导致语法障碍和其他失语症表现中的句子生成障碍。第二部分的研究讨论了竞争性词语选择的其他模型，以及一个特定大脑区域——左额下回的假定作用。第1部分和第2部分的具体目标是根据预期的心理语言学，解剖学和计算进步来制定的。如果成功，该项目将促进对特定大脑网络的损伤如何破坏单词检索的阶段和过程以及顺序单词选择的调节的理解。本研究对后天语言障碍的诊断、人类大脑语言功能的绘制以及理论动机康复策略的发展具有重要意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Acquired aphasia is language loss resulting from stroke or other brain insult. It is a chronic disability that affects more than one million adult Americans, robbing each of the ability to express his or her language competence. The heterogeneous presentation of aphasia poses a challenge for diagnosis, measurement, and treatment of this devastating condition. This long-running grant endeavors to explain the many faces of aphasia from a theoretical perspective. Its methods and models have spawned new forms of assessing and treating aphasia, and offshoot grants supporting clinical trials and rehabilitation research infrastructure. Continuing goals of this project are to explain aphasic impairments in terms of psycholinguistic processing models, and to refine such models through the use of computational methods. This proposal adds a new goal: to further the understanding of brain-language relationships by combining the psycholinguistic description of production impairments with state-of-the art lesion-analysis methods. The proposal is presented in 2 parts. Part 1 advances the understanding of single-word production impairments using data and models developed in past work. Products developed in Part 1 will facilitate clinicians' and researchers' access to our methods and data. Part 2 focuses on the regulation of competitive word selection, and how impairment in such regulation contributes to the sentence-production impairments in agrammatism and other aphasia presentations. Studies in Part 2 address alternative models of competitive word selection and the putative role of one particular brain region - the left inferior frontal gyrus. Specific aims for Parts 1 and 2 are framed in terms of anticipated psycholinguistic, anatomical, and computational advances. If successful, this project will advance the understanding of how damage to specific brain networks disrupts the stages and processes of word retrieval and the regulation of sequential word selection. This research is relevant to the diagnosis of acquired disorders of language, the mapping of language functions in the human brain, and the development of theoretically motivated rehabilitation strategies.