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Lab director: Rhonda B. Friedman, Ph.D.

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.