NACS Seminar: Stephen Wilson (Arizona)

Title: Imaging the language network: functional neuroanatomy, acquired aphasia, and recovery

Abstract: The last decade has seen significant progress in understanding the functional neuroanatomy of language processing. I will present a series of multimodal neuroimaging studies in patients with acquired language deficits of diverse etiologies: stroke, neurodegenerative disease, and resective surgery. These studies have demonstrated robust relationships between damage to specific brain regions and resultant profiles of linguistic deficits, and have shown some ways in which the functional architecture of language processing is reorganized when brain regions that are important for language are damaged. Functional reorganization can explain aspects of language function that do not follow from structural damage alone, and is critical for understanding how language function can recover after key language regions are damaged.