Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- Creators: College of Health Solutions
Agenesis of the corpus callosum is the lack of the development of the corpus callosum. This condition can lead to impairments in language processing, epilepsy, and emotion and social functioning, but many individuals with this condition do not show any of these impairments. The present study investigated the connectivity of language and sensorimotor networks within an individual with agenesis of the corpus callosum using resting-state fMRI. The individual’s results were compared to those of neurotypical control subjects. It was hypothesized that the overall interhemispheric functional connectivity would be less than that of a control group in bilateral language networks, but the intrahemispheric connectivity, particularly within the sensorimotor network, would show greater functional connectivity. The results revealed significantly weaker functional connectivity in the individual with agenesis of the corpus callosum within the right ventral stream compared to the control group. There were no other significant inter or intrahemispheric differences in the functional connectivity of the language and sensorimotor networks. These findings lead us to conclude that the right hemisphere’s ventral stream perhaps relies upon connections with the left hemisphere’s language networks to maintain its typical functionality. The results of this study support the idea that, in the case of corpus callosum agenesis, the right language network may contribute differently to language processes than in neurotypical controls.
Aphasia is an acquired speech-language disorder that is brought upon because of post-stroke damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. Treatment for individuals with these speech production impairments can be challenging for clinicians because there is high variability in language recovery after stroke and lesion size does not predict language outcome (Lazar et al, 2008). It is also important to note that adequate integration between the sensory and motor systems is critical for many aspects of fluent speech and correcting speech errors. The present study seeks to investigate how delayed auditory-feedback paradigms, which alter the time scale of sensorimotor interactions in speech, might be useful in characterizing the speech production impairments in individuals with aphasia. To this end, six individuals with aphasia and nine age-matched control subjects were introduced to delayed auditory feedback at 4 different intervals during a sentence reading task. Our study found that the aphasia group generated more errors in 3 out of the 4 linguistic categories measured across all delay lengths, but that there was no significant main effect delay or interaction between group and delay. Acoustic analyses revealed variability among scores within the control and aphasia groups on all phoneme types. For example, acoustic analyses highlighted how the individual with conduction aphasia showed significantly longer amplitudes at all delays, and significantly larger duration at no delay, but that significance diminished as delay periods increased. Overall, this study suggests that delayed auditory feedback’s effects vary across individuals with aphasia and provides a base of research to be further built on by future testing of individuals with varying aphasia types and levels of severity.