Dr. Murray's general research interest is the cognitive and neural bases of adult neurogenic communication disorders. She is particularly interested in determining how deficits in cognitive processes other than language, such as attention and memory, interact with communication skills. Her work describes and compares the integrity of language and cognition in adults with left or right hemisphere brain-damage, traumatic brain injury, or progressive diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's Diseases.
Current projects compare dual-task performances of adults with aphasia and adults with right hemisphere brain damage to examine whether side of lesion or brain damage in general is most detrimental to attentional skills and to associations between attention and language processes.
Other interests include relating patterns of discourse production (i.e., syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels) in Huntington's and Parkinson's Diseases to the degree of cognitive, behavioral, and motor impairment to identify possible underlying sources of communication impairment, and consequently to develop interventions to improve or maintain effective interaction between brain-damaged patients and their daily communicative partners.
Another ongoing project has been designed to resolve the clinical diagnostic dilemma of distinguishing reversible pseudodementia from the irreversible dementing illness, Alzheimer's disease by quantitatively and qualitatively comparing the language and attention skills of elderly adults with these disorders.
