Ph.D., Harvard University
Albert D. Mead Professor
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
222 Metcalf Research Laboratory
Tel: (401) 863-2616
Email: Sheila_Blumstein@Brown.edu
Go to lab web page

Sheila Blumstein’s research is concerned with the biology and neurology of language and the processes involved in speaking and understanding. The research methodologies used in her lab include behavioral measures of aphasic patients correlated with structural measures of neuropathology and more recently neural modeling and functional neuroimaging of normal subjects. Her research is aphasia explores the effects of brain damage on normal language processing as a window into the neurological bases of language and the mechanisms contributing to normal language processing. Most of her research has focused on speech and language processing deficits in adult aphasics. The major focus of her research program is on sound structure and the lexicon and the processing stages that map sound to meaning and meaning to sound.

With respect to the processing mechanisms contributing to speech production, she is investigating the nature of articulatory implementation deficits in aphasia and the neural mechanisms underlying such deficits. The research strategy is to conduct acoustic analyses of speech productions of both anterior and posterior aphasics in order to infer the articulatory states giving rise to the particular acoustic patterns derived and to identify the neural structures implicated in such deficits. She has proposed that anterior aphasics including Broca’s aphasics have as their basis impairments in articulatory implementation and the processes and mechanisms underlying the motor programming of speech. These deficits are distinguished from and have a distinct neural substrate from lexical selection and phonological planning impairments. She is also investigating the neural systems underlying speech processing. To that end, she is integrating behavioral findings from aphasic patients with functional neuroimaging of normal subjects.

With respect to the processing mechanisms contributing to language understanding, she has proposed that the deficits of aphasic patients stem from the degree to which sound structure elicits activation in the lexicon. Specifically, she has proposed that both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics have deficits in the degree of lexical activation with Broca’s aphasics having reduced lexical activation and Wernicke’s aphasics having increased lexical activation. To test these hypotheses her lab has conducted behavioral studies with aphasic patients, and has developed a neural model simulating these behavioral deficits.

Myers, E.B. and Blumstein, S.E. 2004. Selectional Restriction and Semantic Priming Effects in Normals and Broca’s Aphasics. Journal of Neurolinguistics, in press.

Misiurski, C. , Blumstein, S.E., Rissman, J. and Berman, D. 2004. The role of lexical competition and acoustic-phonetic structure in lexical processing: Evidence from normal subjects and aphasic patients, Brain and Language, in press.

Blumstein, S.E. and Kurowski, K. 2004. The foreign accent syndrome: A perspective. Journal of Neurolinguistics, in press.

Nakano, H. and Blumstein, S.E. 2004. Deficits in thematic integration processes in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia. Brain and Language, 88, 96-107.

Blumstein, S.E. 2004. Phonetic category structure and its influence on lexical processing. Proceedings of the Texas Linguistic Society, Cascadilla Press.

Rissman, J., Eliassen, J. and Blumstein, S.E. 2003. An event-related fMRI investigation of implicit semantic priming. J. of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 1160-1175.

Kurowski, K.,  Hazen,E.,  and. Blumstein, S.E. 2003. The nature of speech production impairments in anterior aphasics: An acoustic analysis of voicing in fricative consonants. Brain and Language, 84, 353-371.

Milberg, W., Blumstein, S.E., Giovanello, S.S. and Misiurski, C. 2003. Summation priming in aphasia: Evidence for alterations in semantic integration and activation. Brain and Cognition, 51, 31-47.

Utman, J.A., Blumstein, S.E. and Sullivan, K. 2001. Mapping from sound to meaning: Reduced lexical activation in Broca’s aphasics, Brain and Language, 79, 444-472.

McNellis, M. and Blumstein, S.E. 2001. Self-Organizing dynamics of lexical access in normals and aphasics. J. Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 151-170.