User:HRShami/Cynthia K. Thompson

Cynthia K. Thompson is an American psychologist, research and professor. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Professor at Northwestern University and the Principal Investigator of Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Lab at Northwestern. She is also the director of Northwestern University Aphasia Center. She is most known for her research on language processing, brain plasticity and aphasia.

The focal point of Thompson's research is language and how language recovers in people with brain damage. She has written six books and over 160 articles in scientific journals. She has also designed and developed several speech assessment tests including: Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection, Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences and Northwestern Anagram Test.

Thompson is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

Education
Thompson received her B.S. in Psychology in 1975 and her M.S. in Psychology in 1976, both from University of Oregon. In 1983, she completed her Ph.D. in Speech and Language Pathology (Linguistics) from University of Kansas.

Career
Thompson joined The Pennsylvania State University as an Assistant Professor in 1982 and taught there for the next three years. She joined University of Florida in 1988 as an Associate Professor. In 1992, she left University of Florida to join Northwestern University in 1992 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and in the Department of Neurology.

Thompson became a full professor at Northwestern in 1999 and in 2009, she was endowed the Ralph and Jean Sundin Chair. In 2008, she also started teaching at the University of Lancaster as an adjunct professor. She was appointed the Director of Northwestern University Aphasia Center in 2015.

Thompson is the principal investigator of Northwestern's Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Lab, which is a part of the Center for the Neurobiology of Language Recovery, an NIH funded initiative that brings together research from Northwestern University, Harvard University, Boston University and Johns Hopkins University.

Thompson was the associate editor of Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research from 2000 to 2003 and the associate editor of American Journal of Speech and Language Pathology from 2008 to 2011. She served on editorial board of Evidence-based Communication Assessment and Intervention from 2007 to 2011 and on the editor board of Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences from 2011 to 2017. In 2014, she became the action editor for cortex.

Research
The focal point of Thompson's research is language and how language recovers in people with brain damage. This work makes use of mutually supportive language representation (linguistic) and processing accounts of normal language to predict breakdown and recovery patterns. These patterns provide blueprints for clinical protocols and, in turn, address the utility of this translational approach for studying language disorders. The processing mechanisms that support recovery also are studied by tracking eye movements in sentence processing and production, and the neural correlates of recovery are examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Thompson has also designed and developed several speech assessment tests including: Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection, Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences and Northwestern Anagram Test.

Neural plasticity of language
In 2017, Thompson and her colleagues began studying how treatment effects offline as well as online sentence processing and the neuroplasticity in domain and language networks in chronic agramamtic aphasia after a stroke. Their research confirmed that people receiving treatment improved on production and comprehension of trained structures. They also found out that treatment effects also generalized to untrained syntactically similar structures. They also conducted an eyetracking comprehension task as part of their research and found out that people receiving treatment have eye movement patterns much similar to the patterns in healthy individuals. Treatment also resulted in activation increases in right hemisphere regions that encompassed both language and domain-general regions, and changes in activation were positively correlated with changes in both offline and online sentence comprehension. Overall, their findings indicate that – when the sentence processing network in the left hemisphere is disrupted – the right hemisphere can be recruited to compensate for language deficits.

Artificial Grammar Learning
In a research they conducted in 2017, Thompson and Julia Schuchard examined Artificial Grammar Learning in older healthy adults and a group of agrammatic aphasic individuals using an artificial grammar adapted from “Language P”. Monosyllabic pseudowords, also known as one syllable fake words, were assigned to one of five lexical categories and were arranged according to the rules of a hierarchical phrase structure grammar to create pseudoword sentences that were used for auditory exposure-based training. Participants underwent a grammaticality judgment test at three time points: immediately following training (Test 1), one day after training (Test 2), and after a second training session (Test 3). Results showed significantly greater learning for both trained groups (healthy and aphasic) compared to the untrained healthy participant group and greater gains at Test 3 vs. Test 2 were found for healthy (than for aphasic) participants.

Aphasia in Mandarin-speaking people
In 2016, Thompson along with other colleagues from the Center for the Neurobiology of Language Recovery visited Beijing where they developed a joint research project focused on studying recovery in Mandarin-speaking people with chronic aphasia. The research was the first of a series of clinical projects aimed at improving the recovery outcomes in Chinese people with aphasia. As part of this project, Thompson co-authored the The Chinese Language Aphasia Battery in 2017.

Neural activation associated with complex sentence processing
In 2019, Thompson and her group conducted an fMRI study and examined brain regions activated by comprehension of syntactically complex sentences, namely passive and object cleft sentences, in 21 healthy participants. Their research showed peak activation in the left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG), Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG), Superior Parietal Lobule (SPL), Supplementary Motor Area (SMA), temporal pole and bilateral occipital regions for all sentences over a control condition consisting of visually scrambled pictures and auditory reversed speech. Noncanonical sentences showed peak activity in the left pars opercularis of the IFG (opIFG), the MFG, the posterior Middle Temporal Gyrus (pMTG), and occipital regions. Comparison of object cleft vs. passive sentences yielded significant activation in the left opIFG, pMTG, medial Superior Frontal Gyrus (mSFG) and insula, with no significant activation derived from the opposite contrasts.

Tests for aphasia
Thompson has also developed several tests for aphasia including Northwestern Anagram Test (NAT), Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS), Northwestern Naming Battery (NNB), Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI).

Treatment of Underlying Forms for aphasia
Thompson along with her colleagues developed Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF), a treatment strategy to improve sentence structure in people with aphasia. TUF takes a different approach than many other aphasia therapies. Many aphasia treatments start at a simple level and become more difficult as the person progresses. However, TUF starts with more complex sentences. The goal is that success with complex sentences will automatically lead to success with simpler sentences.

Awards and honors

 * 1988 - Fellow, Institute for the Advanced Study and Communication Process, University of Florida
 * 1988 - Fellow, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
 * 2000 - Fellow, Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Northwestern University Medical School
 * 2004 - Fellow, Buehler Center on Aging
 * 2007 - Martin E. and Gertrude G. Walder Award of Research Excellence, Northwestern University
 * 2007 - Editor’s award, American Journal of Speech and Language Pathology, for article: Thompson, C. K., & Shapiro, L. P. (2007). “Complexity in treatment of syntactic deficits”
 * 2013 - Honors of the Association, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
 * 2014 - Distinguished Health Professions Alumna, University of Kansas Medical Center
 * 2017 - Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award, Northwestern University

Books

 * Treatment Efficacy Research in Communication Disorders (1990)
 * Functional Assessment of Communication Skills for Adults (1995)
 * Quality of Communication Life Scales (2004)
 * Aphasia Rehabilitation: The Impairment and its Consequences (2007)
 * Perspectives on Agrammatism (2012)
 * The Chinese Language Aphasia Battery (2017)