Achievement

IGERT Trainee Christine Boylan, with her advisors Trueswell & Thompson-Schill have conducted a series of fMRI studies of sentence reading to investigate which types of representations (phonological, orthographic, syntactic and visual) are actively predicted by the brain during the comprehension process. Boylan learned how to implement cutting-edge multi-voxel fMRI classification methods to test her hypotheses. And she has found that the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) plays a role in predicting the syntactic class (Noun, Verb, etc.) of upcoming words in a sentence. Her hypothesis is that this system is predicting phonological and orthographic correlates to syntactic class. Boylan presented this work at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the annual Neurobiology of Language Conference.