ABSTRACT For the vast majority of individuals who suffer a right hemisphere stroke, the resulting right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) causes language production deficits that have a devastating impact on survivors’ quality of life, making social interactions difficult, straining personal relationships, and jeopardizing employment. Output may be acceptable at a grammatic and syntactic level, but may considered inappropriate, impolite, self-centered, verbose, and tangential, and survivors may have difficulty understanding non-literal language and emotional prosody rules that apply to the communication situations. Yet, despite the substantial communication challenges faced by RHD patients, the nature of RHD communication differences and their neuroanatomic correlates remains poorly understood. PI Jamila Minga, PhD’s long-term goal is to improve understanding, assessment, and treatment of language production deficits in RHD survivors. The current K23 project is supported by her preliminary work, which demonstrated that utterance-level productions are key to capturing the RHD communication profile. The central hypothesis—that key characteristics of language production (e.g., question types, utterance complexity, main concepts etc.) have consistent RH cortical mapping that can be used to diagnose, measure, and monitor RHD communication impairments – addresses two critical knowledge gaps in this underexplored scientific domain. These gaps will be evaluated by the following aims: Aim 1) Quantify the effects of right hemisphere brain damage on language production characteristics, and Aim 2) Identify relationships between cortical lesions of the right hemisphere and language production characteristics. The overall objective of this K23 supplement is to support Dr. Minga’s return to full productivity, following serious personal illness and emergency elder care responsibilities. Within one year of the parent K23 award that supports her training, mentorship, and research, she has completed nearly 50% of data collection for both aims. The primary research objective of this administrative supplement is to complete transcription checks, coding (Aim 1) and lesion drawing (Aim 2) for all collected data. Funds will be used to hire additional support staff (an undergraduate student, a speech-language pathologist, and a neuroimage analyst) to train students and to conduct these data analytic steps for continued research progression. The resulting data and analyses will enable future development of a diagnostic model through an anticipated R01 mechanism and a subsequent R01 to evaluate the model for clinical use. This supplemental support will facilitate the timely completion of the K23 parent project, thus ensuring the continuity of Dr. Minga’s plans to build an independent research program developing sensitive diagnostic tools and appropriate therapeutic approaches for RHD survivors.

PROJECT NARRATIVE Language impairments that result from right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) are poorly understood and the parent K23 award focuses on the nature of RHD communication differences and their neuroanatomic correlates. Funds from this administrative supplement will support additional study staff to complete data analyses through the supplement period. Thus, this supplemental support will ensure the timely completion of the K23 parent project and promote the continuity of PI Dr. Jamila Minga’s plans to build an independent research program developing sensitive diagnostic tools and therapeutic approaches for RHD survivors.