Current Projects
1. “Laying the Groundwork for Personalized Medicine in Aphasia Therapy: Genetic and Cognitive Predictors of Restorative Treatment Response”
This NIH-funded project will investigate patient-specific factors that may influence response to therapy for language impairment after stroke, or aphasia. Results from this work will assist with better estimation of prognosis for stroke survivors with aphasia, which could empower patients and families to make more informed health care decisions about how to pursue the most appropriate rehabilitation services based on their unique characteristics, such as genetics, cognitive skills, and brain structure after stroke. Dr. Stacy Harnish (Associate Professor in Speech and Hearing Science) with co-investigators Christopher Bartlett (Nationwide Children’s Hospital), Jeff Pan (Biomedical Informatics), Stephen Petrill (Psychology), David Osher (Psychology), and Vivien Lee (Neurology) were awarded a five-year, $2.3 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders to complete this work.
NIH Grant Number: R01DC017711
Current Student Projects
1. Sources and Self-Management of Chronic Stress in People with Aphasia (Courtney Jewell)
People with aphasia (PWA), a language impairment occurring most often after stroke, often experience profound emotional disturbances. The endorsement of emotional distress has been found to significantly associate with decreased well-being and overall quality of life. Critically, the study of psychological constructs, specifically that of chronic stress, in the field of aphasiology is nascent, leaving mental health commonly unaddressed in PWA. The present study was motivated by the presence and universal acknowledgement of profound chronic stress in PWA, but the lack of empirical research identifying the sources of stress and the self-management strategies, both adaptive and maladaptive, currently being utilized. Through conduction of a mixed-methods research paradigm, we will seek to explore how stress manifests and is managed through personal narratives of lived experiences. The present study also aims to collect longitudinal chronic stress data in PWA for the first time to our knowledge. Findings will have broad implications for the future development of psychotherapeutic interventions that address the mitigation of emotional distress and promotion of adaptive coping mechanisms for a successful life following aphasia from stroke. Specifically, we will inform potential psychotherapeutic targets to enhance coping mechanisms for PWA experiencing chronic stress.
Former Student Projects
1. Neural Compensation in the Language Network (Victoria Diedrichs)
Aphasia impacts approximately one-third of stroke survivors as a result of damage to the language network in the brain. After only a few months, recovery begins to plateau, leading to less than a quarter of individuals with aphasia making a full recovery by 18 months post-stroke. Rehabilitation can continue to facilitate improvements in these individuals with chronic aphasia; however, progress is slow, despite continued use of evidence-based therapeutic interventions by trained speech-language pathologists. Crucially, little is known about the compensatory mechanisms that take place at the neurological level among individuals recovering from aphasia, which could be promoted using technology such as non-invasive brain stimulation to improve recovery. Motivated by a lack of clarity surrounding cortical compensation within the language network, this study aims to use resting state functional connectivity neuroimaging and a series of semantic and phonological working memory tasks to explore compensatory activity further. Sites such as the anterior superior temporal gyrus and posterior middle temporal gyrus have been implicated by previous findings to compensate for language processing in individuals with lesions to the inferior frontal gyrus. Our findings will have broad implications for our understanding of neuroplasticity within the language network of individuals with aphasia and more specifically inform montage placement for future clinical trials of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques.
2. The Role of Emotion in Word Production in Neurologically-Intact Adults and Adults with Aphasia (Deena Schwen Blackett)
A hallmark symptom of aphasia is anomia (i.e., difficulty thinking of the word one wants to use). Current language models fail to consider the potential impact of emotional stimuli on word retrieval, which could impact language assessment and treatment in the aging and aphasia populations. People with aphasia have previously demonstrated superior language performance for emotional compared to non-emotional stimuli on a range of language tasks, suggesting that emotion favorably impacts language processing for this population. However, to our knowledge, no studies have examined the effect of emotion on word retrieval. Furthermore, there have been no attempts to integrate the variable of emotion into existing word retrieval models. There is a need to better understand the role emotion plays in word retrieval, which could lead to more complete word retrieval models and inform stimuli use in language assessment and treatment. To accomplish this, it will be important to understand the effect of emotion on word retrieval in aging, neurologically intact adults and adults with aphasia. This study aims to focus on the performance of aging adults and people with aphasia on a series of single-word generation tasks involving positive, negative, and neutral stimuli.