Research Projects
The Aphasia Research Center focuses on the production and comprehension of language in individuals with brain injury as well as normal individuals, both monolinguals and bilinguals. Some of the current projects are described below. Interested in Participating?
Verbs
Some individuals with aphasia find it difficult to produce verbs while speaking. They may use more general verbs, such as She made cake instead of She baked a cake. Or, they may substitute different inflectional variants of the verb, for example, Yesterday she going to the mall for Yesterday she went to the mall . In some occasions, they may not produce a verb when one is required, for example, Tuesday.dentist. 4 o'clock. Difficulties with producing verbs often make their speech ungrammatical and require the listener to guess the intent and fill in information. This creates difficulties in communication between the aphasic individual and communication partner.
We investigate various aspects of verb production in individuals with aphasia and compare these with individuals who do not have aphasia (matched for age and education). We are particularly interested in examining which linguistic variables exacerbate aphasic individuals' difficulty with verbs and which variables ameliorate their production difficulties. We use a variety of experimental tasks such as picture description, sentence completion, repetition, and reaction time measures, to investigate these questions.
- Faroqi-Shah, Y. (2007) Are regular and irregular verbs dissociated in non-fluent aphasia? A meta-analysis, Brain Research Bulletin 74 , 1-13. click here to read abstract
- Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. (2007) Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features, Journal of Memory and Language, 56 129-151. click here to read abstract
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Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (2004) Semantic, lexical, and phonological influences on the production of verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia, Brain and Language 89, 484-498. click here to read abstract
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Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (November 2003). Verbal inflections in agrammatic aphasia: A multilevel analysis. Platform presentation: American Speech-Language and Hearing Association, Chicago.
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Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (October 2003). Regular and irregular verbs in agrammatism: dissociation or association? Platform presentation: Academy of Aphasia, Vienna, Austria.
Treatment Efficacy
A primary focus of our research is developing and testing treatment protocols for individuals with aphasia. We will use the findings of our behavioral studies to learn more about specific deficits and design treatment protocols. The treatment studies will focus on verbs and sentences. Our treatment studies involve individual treatment sessions, 5 times a week for 2-3 hours each. Treatment studies typically extend between 2-4 weeks.
- Faroqi-Shah, Y. (submitted). A comparison of two theoretically-driven treatments of verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia. Neuropsychologia. click here to read abstract
Neuroimaging
Since aphasia results from injury to the brain, we are interested in learning more about the relationship between brain damage and language production and comprehension difficulties in individuals with and without aphasia. We are specifically interested in examining the neural correlates of verb production, verb morphology and sentence processing. Our research aims at documenting changes in neural activity that occur in patients who participate in our treatment efficacy studies (see above). We are using magnetoencephalogy (MEG) in conjunction with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for our studies.
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Marian, V., Shildkrot, Y., Blumenfeld, H.K., Kaushanskaya, M., Faroqi-Shah, Y., & Hirsch, J. (2007). Cortical activation during word processing in late bilinguals: Similarities and differences as revealed by fMRI. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neurophysiology 29, 247-265. click here to read abstract
Sentence Production
The the the. woman no girl the girl kicking the man no kiss kiss. girl kiss the man.
The lad is ficing her.
No doubt, the above two sentences are very different - but these were produced by two different aphasic individuals to describe the same picture of a woman kissing a man. Aphasia is a general term referring to a disruption in language production and comprehension after brain damage. In fact, there are several subtypes of aphasia. We are interested in comparing the sentence production patterns of individuals with different aphasia types in order to understand the underlying deficits and their manifestations. This information would inform about language impairments in aphasia, normal language processing, and well as treatment strategies for aphasic individuals.
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Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (2003). Effect of lexical cues on the production of active and passive sentences in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Brain and Language, 85, 409-426 . click here to read abstract
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Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (May 2001). Comparing sentence production in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Platform presentation: Clinical Aphasiology Conference, Santa Fe.
Adverbs
Most of our communication occurs by means of connected speech such as narrating events. Connected speech contains several sentences, and sentences are often linked together with adverbs (words such as before-after, last night, during, etc.). Individuals with aphasia often experience difficulties with connected discourse, especially in the degree of cohesiveness between utterances. Hence we are interested in aphasic individual's use of adverbs and how their difficulty with adverbial production relates to their difficulties with producing verbs (see above). We are also investigating if their ability to produce and comprehend adverbs varies with task demands.
- Faroqi-Shah, Y. (March 2006). CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, New York. Platform Presentation.
Detection of Sentence Anomalies
What is wrong with these sentences: I went to school tomorrow, I going to the movies? Individuals with aphasia often produce such sentences. But are they able to detect their own errors or errors in other's sentences? And what is the relationship between their production and detection abilities? We do not know the answers to these questions and we are currently investigating this. This research is in collaboration with Dr. Michael Dickey of the University of Pittsburgh. The neural correlates of anomaly detection are also being examined using magnetoencephalograhy.
- Faroqi-Shah, Y., Dickey, M., & Sampson, M. (2007). On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia, Brain and Language 103, 8-249. click here to read abstract
- Faroqi-Shah, Y., Dickey, M., & Sampson, M. (2007). On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia. Paper presented at Academy of Aphasia, Washington DC. click here for both ppt.
Bilingualism
More than half the world's population is bilingual! Naturally, there are more bilingual individuals with aphasia than monolingual individuals with aphasia. Nonetheless, most research on aphasia has been done with monolingual speakers, and far less is known about sentence production, verb production, and treatment efficacy in bilingual aphasia.
Our previous research focused on treatment efficacy and generalization in multilingual aphasia. We observed that some treatment effects can extend to another untreated language depending on factors such as age of acquisition, language proficiency and structural distance between the treated and untreated languages.
Another study, headed by Dr. Viorica Marian, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) to examine the neural regions involved in lexical processing in bilinguals who learned their second language in their teenage years.
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Faroqi, Y. & Chengappa, S. (1998). Trace deletion hypothesis and its implications for intervention with a multilingual agrammatic aphasic patient. Osmania Papers in Linguistics: Special volume on applied psycholinguistics, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 23, 79-106. click here to read abstract
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Marian,V., Faroqi-Shah, Y. , Sheng, L., Shildkrot, E., & Hirsch, J. (August 2002). One brain, two languages: cortical similarities and differences in bilinguals. Poster presentation: American Psychological Association, Chicago.
click here to read abstract
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