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Language Program

This program investigates the development of language in normal children and adults, and in children and adults with language disorders (e.g., specific language impairment (SLI), aphasia). Language is crucially used to understand logical inferences, so one program central to understanding normal and SLI children is to investigate how they come to comprehend and use expressions that convey logical relations, and to identify the associated neural markers of these milestones using the brain imaging technique, magnetoencephalography (MEG). We are conducting an extensive SLI project, taking advantage of the research teams’ considerable expertise in different domains of language, by concurrently investigating three subtypes of SLI: grammatical-SLI, phonological-SLI, and pragmatic-SLI. These various forms of SLI are often treated as unrelated. Using MEG, the commonalities and differences can be examined directly. In addition to studies of normal language development and developmental disorders of language, theories of adult language processing can be refined and tested by studying adults with acquired language impairments (aphasia; progressive language impairment) and these theories are used as the basis for cognitively-based intervention studies.

Program Leader

• Professor Stephen Crain

Projects

• How children with specific language impairment interpret logical words
• The development of linguistic representations in children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders
• Language impairments and treatment in aphasia
• How tense and negation interact in children with specific language impairment