Sharon M. Antonucci

Assistant Professor

Adults with language impairment "dealt so gracefully with having lost something that once had come so naturally to them."

When Sharon Antonucci first observed adults with language impairment as a result of stroke, she was amazed by their perseverance. "They dealt so gracefully with having lost something that once had come so naturally to them."

Since that time, Antonucci has committed herself to working with people who have word retrieval and language difficulty due to brain trauma. She does high-resolution MRI scans of their brains to map the places where damage, in the form of lesions, is present. She then compares the size and location of the lesions to people's ability to remember words to learn more about brain-behavior relationships.

"Right now I'm working with people who have damage to the brain's left middle cerebral artery, blockage or hemorrhage to which often leads to stroke aphasia, a language impairment that results from brain injury." She's trying to determine if these people have difficulty retrieving specific types of conceptual information about objects that impacts their word retrieval ability. The long-term goal of this work is to develop more specific treatments for people who have word retrieval problems.

"There are a number of treatments out there that use semantic cuing procedures to help people retrieve specific words. Let's say someone is trying to retrieve the name for an apple. You'd cue them to describe the apple, or tell you what you can do with an apple. You're helping them talk around the object to help them remember the word. Using what we know about the location of people's lesions and the information they are able to process, we hope to better tailor semantic cuing procedures."

Students are participating in Antonucci's research in a number of different ways. "I'm currently working with an undergraduate student who's helping me with lesion analyses," she says. "and last summer I ran a treatment study that investigated the use of semantic cuing techniques in group therapy for people who have aphasia. I was very happy to have both a master’s and an undergraduate student assisting me with that study."

Students also volunteered their help with the National Aphasia Association Speaking Out! 2008 Conference, co-sponsored by Steinhardt and co-chaired by Antonucci. "This biannual conference is unique in that it includes all kinds of health care professionals, mainly speech-language pathologists, as well as people with aphasia and their co-survivors. Internationally recognized aphasia researchers came to Steinhardt to talk about their work and the different types of therapy techniques they use. Even more importantly, people with aphasia who attended - with their family and friends - also shared their own experiences with treatment and with living well with aphasia."

Events like these tell Antonucci that the department is moving in a great direction. She's also cheered by the possibility of collaboration with her departmental colleagues. "At the moment I'm working with a colleague outside the University. We're looking at a lifetime perspective of conceptual development, the development of the ability to learn and remember words, and what can happen neurologically to interrupt that process across the lifespan. I'm looking forward to doing some of that cross-lifespan work with the child language researchers in our own department as well."

Sharon M. Antonucci's complete faculty bio.