aphasia research center
@ University of Maryland, College Park
The ability to speak is one of the most intriguing and complex functions of the human brain. When this ability is hindered due to brain injury, it can have a devastating impact on the person's quality of life. The overarching goal of our research is to improve communication outcomes for individuals whose ability to speak has been impacted by brain injury, a condition called aphasia. We are specifically interested in sentence production and word retrieval abilities and their breakdown in aphasia, language learning and training-induced neural plasticity, and their interaction with bilingualism and cognitive mechanisms.
Our studies focus on neurologically healthy individuals and those with stroke-induced left hemisphere injury (a condition called aphasia). Most of our research uses on behavioral paradigms, but we also utilize cognitive neuroscience methods (including MEG, and fMRI).
Please explore our research, publications, who we are, and how you can participate or contact us.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Sep. 25 Colloquium at Temple University by Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah and Seongsil Lee
Oct. 18-20 Three presentations at the Academy of Aphasia Conference by Nina Pillai, Seongsil Lee, Zofia Cieslak and Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah
FEATURED PUBLICATION
Relationship between musical and language abilities in post-stroke aphasia in Aphasiology
In this study, we found that prior musical ability in persons with aphasia was associated with less severe aphasia and better structural processing of music and language.
FEATURED PROJECT
Treatment of Sentence Production for Persons with Aphasia
This study examines if training to produce specific types of sentences (e.g. past tense) will also improve other untrained sentence types. We are currently recruiting persons with aphasia for this study. You can read more about participating in our research here.