Loraine K. Obler | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Distinguished Professor in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences |
Awards | Doctorate Honoris Causa |
Academic background | |
Education | Ph.D. University of Michigan Linguistics |
Academic work | |
Institutions | CUNY Graduate Center |
Loraine Katherine Obler (born July 12,1948) [1] is an American linguist and neuroscientist,internationally recognized as a leading scholar in the field of neurolinguistics and multilingualism. [2] [3] She is known for her contributions to understanding how language-related behavior is controlled within the brain. Her work spans diverse sub-disciplines such as the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, [4] language processing in aging and Alzheimer's disease, [5] and the cross-language study of aphasia. [6]
Obler is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center where she holds appointments in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences,Linguistics,and Cognitive Neuroscience. [7] [8]
Obler received the title of Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Stockholm University in 1993 and Turku University in 2011. [7] She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association (APA),Division 44. [9] In 2023,the edited volume Advances in the Neurolinguistic Study of Multilingual and Monolingual Adults:In Honor of Professor Loraine K. Obler was published in recognition of her career contributions. [10]
Obler completed her high school education at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City in 1966. [8] In 1969,she earned her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) from the University of Michigan with a major in Studies in Religion. Following her undergraduate studies,she pursued her further education at the University of Michigan. [8] She obtained her first Master of Arts (M.A.) in Linguistics in 1970 and deepened her expertise by earning a second Master of Arts (M.A.) in Near East Studies in 1973 and her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1975. Her dissertation was conducted under the supervision of Ernest T. Abdel-Massih and titled "Reflexes of the Classical Arabic šayʔun 'Thing' in the Modern Dialects:A Study in Patterns of Language Change." [11]
Obler has had a lifelong interest in learning languages. She grew up in a predominantly English-speaking environment,but developed skills in speaking and understanding Hebrew during yearly trips to Israel. During her high school years,she studied French,demonstrating a good reading ability. She also studied Spanish,German,and Chinese,achieving varying levels of proficiency,and dedicated four years to learning Arabic,focusing more on reading and writing than speaking. [12]
Obler has held numerous academic and research positions. She has a longstanding association with City University of New York (CUNY),initially as a Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences [13] and later as a Distinguished Professor. [7] Obler has held positions at Boston University,Boston University School of Medicine,the Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center at the VA Boston Healthcare Center,Emerson College,and internationally at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [14] She was named a Senior Fulbright Specialist on Multilingual and Multicultural Issues in Speech-Language Pathology at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. [15] [7]
Obler's work has examined a wide range of topics including language comprehension and aging,language performance under stress. development of bilingualism in immigrant communities,language processing difficulties in dementia,and agrammatism. Her book with Martin Albert,The Bilingual Brain:Neuropsychological and Neurolinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism, [4] become an important reference in the emerging field of neurolinguistics. The volume examined how multiple languages are organized in the brain through a comparative analysis of first and second languages. [16] Obler has co-edited a number of scientific volumes. Language and Communication in the Elderly is a collection of articles by eminent researchers and clinicians exploring diagnostic and rehabilitive approaches to the language behavior of both normal and senile elderly persons. [17] [18] Bilingualism across the Lifespan:Aspects of Acquisition,Maturity and Loss is a collection of papers on the development of language over the lifespan,bilingual language acquisition,and language attrition. [19] [20]
Obler's work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),the National Science Foundation,and the Israel-U.S. Binational Foundation. [21] [22]
In aphasia, a person may be unable to comprehend or unable to formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in the Global North. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, epilepsy, autoimmune neurological diseases, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases.
Jean Berko Gleason is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.
Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.
Anomic aphasia is a mild, fluent type of aphasia where individuals have word retrieval failures and cannot express the words they want to say. By contrast, anomia is a deficit of expressive language, and a symptom of all forms of aphasia, but patients whose primary deficit is word retrieval are diagnosed with anomic aphasia. Individuals with aphasia who display anomia can often describe an object in detail and maybe even use hand gestures to demonstrate how the object is used, but cannot find the appropriate word to name the object. Patients with anomic aphasia have relatively preserved speech fluency, repetition, comprehension, and grammatical speech.
Neuropsychological tests are specifically designed tasks that are used to measure a psychological function known to be linked to a particular brain structure or pathway. Tests are used for research into brain function and in a clinical setting for the diagnosis of deficits. They usually involve the systematic administration of clearly defined procedures in a formal environment. Neuropsychological tests are typically administered to a single person working with an examiner in a quiet office environment, free from distractions. As such, it can be argued that neuropsychological tests at times offer an estimate of a person's peak level of cognitive performance. Neuropsychological tests are a core component of the process of conducting neuropsychological assessment, along with personal, interpersonal and contextual factors.
Alexander Romanovich Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria's magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962), is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Working Brain in 1973.
Wernicke's area, also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to Broca's area, which is primarily involved in the production of language. It is traditionally thought to reside in Brodmann area 22, which is located in the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere, which is the left hemisphere in about 95% of right-handed individuals and 70% of left-handed individuals.
Edith F. Kaplan was an American psychologist. She was a pioneer of neuropsychological tests and did most of her work at the Boston VA Hospital. Kaplan is known for her promotion of clinical neuropsychology as a specialty area in psychology. She examined brain-behavioral relationships in aphasia, apraxia, developmental issues in clinical neuropsychology, as well as normal and abnormal aging. Kaplan helped develop a new method of assessing brain function with neuropsychological assessment, called "The Boston Process Approach."
Language attrition is the process of decreasing proficiency in or losing a language. For first or native language attrition, this process is generally caused by both isolation from speakers of the first language ("L1") and the acquisition and use of a second language ("L2"), which interferes with the correct production and comprehension of the first. Such interference from a second language is likely experienced to some extent by all bilinguals, but is most evident among speakers for whom a language other than their first has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life; these speakers are more likely to experience language attrition. It is common among immigrants that travel to countries where languages foreign to them are used. Second language attrition can occur from poor learning, practice, and retention of the language after time has passed from learning. This often occurs with bilingual speakers who do not frequently engage with their L2.
Aditi Lahiri is an Indian-born British linguist and Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University of Oxford. She held the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Oxford from 2007 until her retirement in 2022; she was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her main research interests are in phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.
Lise Menn is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia.
Eleanor M. Saffran, an American neuroscientist, was a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuropsychology. Her interest in Neuropsychology began at the Baltimore City hospitals of Johns Hopkins University, where her research unit focused on neurological patients with language or cognitive impairments. In papers published between 1976 and 1982, Dr. Saffran spelled out the methodological tenets of “cognitive neuropsychology” exemplified in her studies of aphasia, alexia, auditory verbal agnosia, and short-term memory impairment.
Neuroscience of multilingualism is the study of multilingualism within the field of neurology. These studies include the representation of different language systems in the brain, the effects of multilingualism on the brain's structural plasticity, aphasia in multilingual individuals, and bimodal bilinguals. Neurological studies of multilingualism are carried out with functional neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and through observation of people who have suffered brain damage.
In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea is a communication disorder that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or brain injury. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of Wernicke's aphasia, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech.
The Boston Naming Test (BNT), introduced in 1983 by Edith Kaplan, Harold Goodglass and Sandra Weintraub, is a widely used neuropsychological assessment tool to measure confrontational word retrieval in individuals with aphasia or other language disturbance caused by stroke, Alzheimer's disease, or other dementing disorder. A common and debilitating feature is anomic aphasia, an impairment in the ability to name objects. The BNT contains 60 line drawings graded in difficulty. Patients with anomia often have greater difficulties with the naming of not only difficult and low frequency objects but also easy and high frequency objects. Naming difficulties may be rank ordered along a continuum. Items are rank ordered in terms of their ability to be named, which is correlated with their frequency. This type of picture-naming test is also useful in the examination of children with learning disabilities and the evaluation of brain-injured adults.
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.
Alfredo Ardila was a Colombian neuropsychologist. He graduated as a psychologist from the National University of Colombia and received a doctoral degree in neuropsychology from the Moscow State University where he worked with Alexander R. Luria. He published in cognitive and behavioral neurosciences, especially in neuropsychology. His research interests included brain organization of cognition, the historical origin of human cognition, aphasia, and bilingualism.
Randi Martin is the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychology at Rice University and Director of the T. L. L. Temple Foundation Neuroplasticity Research Laboratory. With Suparna Rajaram and Judith Kroll, Martin co-founded Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, an organization supported in part through the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Leadership program. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP).
Ofelia García (Otheguy) is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) and Urban Education at Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is best known for her work on bilingualism, translanguaging, language policy, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language. Her work emphasizes dynamic multilingualism, which is developed through "an interplay between the individual’s linguistic resources and competences as well as the social and linguistic contexts she/he is a part of." Rather than viewing a bilingual's languages as autonomous, García views language practices as complex and interrelated, as reflecting a single linguistic system.
Nancy Helm-Estabrooks is an emeritus professor at Western Carolina University where she was the first Brewer Smith Distinguished Professor. She is known for her work on persons with aphasia and acquired cognitive-communication disorders.