Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension

本研究的长期目标是了解句子中失语障碍的本质 理解，特别是使用句法结构来确定句子的意义，以及 句子理解的过程是在大脑中组织的。这个项目将研究失语症 单次中风患者使用不同句法结构来确定 句子的意思，测试他们在一些任务中的使用。这些行为研究的结果将是 详细描述患者能够理解的内容，以及他/她如何在听到时处理句法结构 它们（在线处理）以及句子结束时（离线处理）。我们将获得磁共振图像 病人大脑区域的结构和灌注，并将确定受影响的区域。 中风，使用现代分析方法。然后，我们将寻找大脑区域，其中病变大小占 在性能上的显著差异。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两个问题（例如， 是否个别患者失去了完成特定句法操作的能力， 困难最好被看作是由于他们完成手术的能力的病理限制， 一般来说，首先影响更复杂的结构），以及关于神经问题，如是否有方面的影响。 句子理解过程总是位于所有个体的相同脑区。结果 could have important重要consequences后果for howwe think of these disorders紊乱and the neural神经organization组织， 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.