Cognitive neuroscience of normal and disordered language function

We currently communicate our research to the clinical and academic community through research papers in peer-reviewed journals and national and international conferences. We make our research more widely known to the general public by contributing talks to major popular scientific meetings such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and public meetings at the British Academy. At a local level we have participated in the well-attended Cambridge Science Week, and have given talks at primary schools. However, this is an area where we intend to be substantially more proactive in the future. Our work provides insights into the way the brain represents and processes language, and is inherently of public interest. Our strategy will be: To provide media training to all staff who might be in contact with journalists; To examine all our forthcoming papers for newsworthiness; To issue a minimum of three press releases a year on new CSL findings; To continue to be involved in Science Week activities; To attempt to place four articles a year in publications for our key audiences [eg speech and language therapists, consultant neurologists, gerontologists, and patient organisations representing people who have had strokes]; To identify and approach 2-3 journalists with an interest in this field, [eg Clare Wilson at the New Scientist]; To improve our web site, making it more accessible to a general audience and adding more links to and from sites visited by our key audiences. We intend to develop a new strategy with the help of Martin Ince, a science communicator whose other clients include BBSRC, ESRC, AHRB and the DTI. He will do this work pro bono.

The ability to communicate using language is a remarkable capacity that is unique to humans. In this research we aim to investigate this capacity in a cognitive neuroscience framework, closely integrating research into language function in the normal system, based on well-developed cognitive theory, with the study of acute and chronic damage to the underlying neural systems.
Cognitively based fMRI studies with normal adults will provide basic information on the patterns of cortical activation and functional connectivity elicited by different types of linguistic input. These results will be related to performance in chronic and acute stroke patients with various language deficits. We will combine behavioural tasks with multi-modal imaging techniques (e.g., efMRI, functional connectivity analysis, VBM-based correlational analyses, perfusion weighted imaging, diffusion tensor imaging) to illuminate the basis for normal function and to determine the source of preserved capacities in patients with aphasia. In particular, the research will investigate the functional and neural architecture of the core language system, asking how frontal and temporal cortices in the left and right hemispheres interact to support key lexical and syntactic functions. We will compare processing of simple words with more complex linguistic units (complex words, phrases, sentences), to track the manner in which the bilateral process of lexical access from speech links to left-dominant fronto-temporal processes, depending on the type and degree of combinatorial processing required in lexical and syntactic domains, and comparing performance in unimpaired controls with acute and chronic stroke patients.
These studies will enable us both to evaluate our theoretical account of the neurobiology of normal language function, and to address a set of additional key issues relating to the respective roles of neural plasticity, neural specialisation, and functional reorganisation in explaining and predicting how the language system responds to damage to its components. The extent to which preserved language function reflects processes of plasticity and re-organisation, or simply residual function in undamaged areas, bears on the central issue of language specialisation and may also provide insights into those language functions which are plausible candidates for remediation of function.