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Murray
Grossman, M.D., Ed.D.
Associate Professor, Dept of Neurology
School of Medicine
3 West Gates/4283
(215) 662-3361 FAX: (215) 349-5579
email: mgrossma@mail.med.upenn.edu
Click here for selected publications since Dr. Grossman's arrival at Penn
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Evaluating the cognitive and physiological basis for language and communicative
processing in humans RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
Computer testing; structural imaging with MRI; functional imaging with fMRI; pharmacologic studiesRESEARCH SUMMARY
Language processing skills such as sentence comprehension and word meaning are complex tasks that involve multiple cognitive and linguistic components. There are specific linguistic computations that must be performed, such as constructing a phrase level description of an utterance and looking up the meaning of individual words in semantic memory. In addition, there are related cognitive procedures that contribute to language processing such as retaining a transient mental representation of a sentence in a short-term memory buffer while it is being analyzed and using working memory and inhibitory control to manage multiple, competing, and possibly ambiguous meanings within a message. Cognitive processes such as these must be executed in a temporally organized fashion. We develop tasks that assess specific components of complex language and cognitive processes in individuals with neurological diseases including Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal degeneration, and Parkinson's disease. Similar tasks are administered to healthy young adults and healthy seniors during the monitoring of regional cerebral activity with BOLD fMRI, and we study patients under similar conditions to understand the neural basis for their difficulties.
