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Aneta Kielar |
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Research Interests
My research focuses on language representation in the brain. I am interested in using a combination of neuroimaging methods such as ERPs and fMRI to study brain-language relationship at the multiple levels, from perceptual and motor stages to higher level language processes.
I am also interested in the integration of behavioural and electrophysiological measures of brain function in normal and neuropsychologically impaired populations in order to understand changes in cognitive processing associated with brain damage and recovery.
Grammatical Morphology I study how healthy adults learn and process inflectional and derivational morphology. A main debate in psycholinguistics revolves around the status of grammatical rules in language (e.g., regular past tenses like bake-baked) vs. exceptions (e.g., irregular past tenses like take-took). The resolution of this issue can help us better understand the types of brain mechanisms we use to learn all the rules of language.
Functional Neuroimaging of Language Processing I also study the brain mechanisms of language processing using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in combination with cross-modal and visual priming techniques. The results of these studies indicate that language is processed by an interactive and distributed network of brain regions that encode different types of linguistic information.
Language Processing in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease
I am also investigating noun and verb processing in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. This study looked at the effect of Alzheimer disease on language processing. The naming of different grammatical categories was investigated based on the clinical stage of disease (i.e., early, vs. middle clinical stage). This study extends pervious findings by measuring differences in naming of regular and irregular verbs in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Working Memory and Language Processing
I also study how individual differences in working memory affect sentence comprehension ability. This study focuses on the interaction between various working memory measures and syntactic comprehension under concurrent perceptual or memory loads. The findings indicate that different cognitive processes involved in language comprehension interact with different types of interference and the degree of involvement of cognitive operations in sentence processing depend on the demands of the task at hand.
Aneta Kielar; 2008 |