At the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Georgetown University Medical Center, research focuses on how language is processed in the normal brain, how language breaks down in a brain damaged by stroke, head injury, or dementia, and how the brain recovers language functions -- with or without therapy -- in the months and years following the injury.
Specific areas of focus include:
- Gaining a better understanding of acquired disorders of language (aphasia), reading (alexia), and word finding (anomia);
- Devising and testing improved rehabilitation techniques for alexia and anomia based upon cognitive models of language;
- Gaining insight into the neural mechanisms of language recovery;
- Studying the progressive decline of language, reading, and semantic memory in dementia;
- Investigating different learning paradigms that may be efficacious in rehabilitation following brain injury.
Techniques employed include behavioral studies; treatment studies; functional magnetic imaging (fMRI); event related potentials (ERP); and eye-tracking.
