I am currently the Lead Investigator on a project titled ‘The development of an Aphasia battery for Qatari/Eastern Arabic’, and a Principal Investigator in a project titled ‘Neurophysiological Investigations of Arabic: An EEG study’.
The two projects particularly focus on the underlying mechanisms of language processing for healthy Arabic speakers and speakers with aphasia, and are supported by the National Priorities Research Program grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).
1. The development of an Aphasia assessment battery for Qatari/Eastern Arabic
I, Dr. Eiman Mustafawi (Qatar University), Prof. David Howard (Newcastle University), and Dr. Ruth Herbert (University of Sheffield) are developing a Test Battery for use with speakers of Eastern/Qatari Arabic with aphasia.
The test battery will be developed based on normative data collected from 160 healthy speakers of Eastern/Qatari Arabic, for variables including normative reaction time, Name Agreement, Visual complexity & Image agreement of pictures, Age of acquisition, Familiarity, and Imageability. This projects aims at establishing the corner stone for psycholinguistics and aphasia research in Qatar University.
2. Neurophysiological Investigations of Arabic: An EEG study
I, Dr. Ali Idrissi (Qatar University), and Dr. Eiman Mustafawi (Qatar University) are investigating processing of Arabic sentence structures and how the brain constructs meaning out of Arabic sentences in real-time. We aim to do this through the establishment of the Electroencephalography Lab within the Department of English Literature & Linguistics at Qatar University. The lab will be used to develop data from Arabic and relate it to cognitive and linguistic theories of language processing, by combining key neuro- and psycho-linguistic techniques in conducting imaging and behavioral experiments with healthy and impaired speakers of Arabic.
