My research is concerned with basic questions about the nature of language and how it is acquired, used, and represented in the brain. Much of this research has been concerned with reading (a particular use of language), how reading skill is acquired by children, and forms of dyslexia that occur developmentally or in adults as a consequence of neuropathology. This research has significant implications concerning the teaching of reading and the identification and remediation of dyslexia. The research involves behavioral and neuroimaging studies and the development of large-scale computational ("neural network") models of normal and disordered language. The broader goal of our research is to understand general principles that govern reading as well as other aspects of language. Thus the theoretical framework that was originally developed in connection with reading is being applied to issues in phonology, inflectional and derivational morphology, and lexical semantics, and its implications concerning the brain bases of language are being studied using fMRI at the Keck Neuroimaging Center. The goal of the research is to understand language and its brain bases using computational models as the theoretical interface between the two.