Thursday, December 26, 2024
12/26/2024
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Language production deficits caused by right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) are an underexplored scientific domain, despite affecting the vast majority of individuals who suffer a right hemisphere stroke. RHD patients often exhibit self-centered, inappropriate, and impolite language -- deficits that have a significant impact on their quality of life from personal relationships to employment status. Despite the devastating impact of these impairments for RHD patients and their families, very fewstudies have been undertaken to understand the nature of RHD communication differences, especially in comparison to the more obvious impairments observed after left hemisphere stroke. The current project addresses two critical knowledge gaps. First, we need a better understanding of what is wrong with the language produced by RHD patients, and second, we need to understand which right hemisphere brain areas are associatedwith which particular types of languagedeficits. These gaps will be addressed through two aims. The first aim will provide a rigorous and quantitative evaluation of the specific features of language production that are impaired following RHD, via a battery of linguistic production tasks. The second aim will involve identification of the brain areas within the right hemisphere that are associated with these deficits. Furthermore, both the behavioral and neural data will be aggregated in the burgeoning RHDBank database developed by the PI, fostering future work in this area by the scientific community at large. As PI, Dr. Minga is an early-stage career investigator with institutional support from Duke University. As a K12 award recipient, she has established a diverse mentoring team with expertise in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, speech-language pathology, and discourse corpus development. Dr. Minga’s career development plan serves to capitalize on these collaborations through workshops, seminars, and didactic training. The proposed research contributes to the growing body of knowledge concerning language production differences in adults with RHD by examining the specific indices of language production characteristics that distinguish adults with RHD and potential neuroanatomic correlates while building a corpus of imaging and language use samples for the widespread study of communication after RHD. Delineation of specific and quantifiable characteristics of language production after RHD and their relationship to lesion site(s) can foster the development of clinically relevant diagnostic measures and potential therapies.
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