The Center was established in 2013. CNLR studies examine the neural mechanisms of language processing in healthy people, how language is compromised when the brain is damaged, language recovery following stroke, and how the brain reorganizes to support recovered language. A primary goal is to examine the effects of psycholinguistically based treatments for aphasia that have been shown in previous research to improve language and promote neuroplasticity. The treatments we provide use what is known about how language is processed normally in order to stimulate optimal neural activity to support recovered language. CNLR research also seeks to identify cognitive and neural biomarkers of recovery to improve prognosis of language recovery.
CNLR studies are focused primarily on recovery of naming and sentence processing deficits in aphasia. Our naming recovery work takes place in Boston, MA, led by Dr. Swathi Kiran (Boston University), an expert in naming deficits in aphasia; and our sentence processing work is centered in Chicago, IL and is led by Dr. Cynthia Thompson (Northwestern University), an expert in normal and disordered sentence processing. Drs. Kiran and Thompson serve as co-directors of the Center.
All CNLR projects use a common set of language/behavioral and neuroimaging measures, administered to all study participants across sites, to study recovery patterns (learning and generalization as well as brain changes) occurring as a result of treatment. The treatments provided are based on the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (CATE) (Thompson, et al., 2003) – training complex linguistic material (i.e., words, sentences) promotes generalization to simple items and/or structures. Our goal is to study the effects of treatment on language and the brain in large numbers of people with aphasia to identify factors related to recovery, including both cognitive variables (e.g., learning and memory) and brain variables (e.g., site and extent of brain damage, blood flow in undamaged brain tissue, the integrity of connections between brain regions (i.e., white matter tracts), and brain activity during rest). The methodological synchrony across all projects within CNLR allows for a comprehensive study of language recovery across language domains.
Supported by: National Institutes of Health (NIH, NIDCD) P50DC012283