Cynthia K. Thompson

Career

Early in her academic career, Thompson held Assistant and associate professor positions at The Pennsylvania State University and the University of Florida, respectively. She joined the NU faculty in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in 1992 and was appointed Distinguished Ralph and Ralph and Jean Sundin Professor in 2009. Among her many contributions to the department she founded and directed the Aphasia Center at NU.

Thompson was Associate Editor for Language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research from 2000 to 2003, and Specialty Chief Editor for the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Speech and Language from 2019 to 2022. She has been an Action Editor for Cortex since 2014. She also served as Chair of the Research and Scientific Affairs Committee for the American Speech, Language, Hearing Association (ASHA) from 1998 to 2001 and Chair of the Clinical Aphasiology Program in 2001. For the Academy of Aphasia she served on the Board of Governors from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2011 to 2017, and as Treasurer from 2011 to 2017.

Thompson is a fellow of the Mesulam Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center and the Buehler Center on Aging at NU and the Institute for the Advanced Study and Communication Process (University of Florida). She is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and received honors of the Association, the highest award conferred by ASHA in 2013.

Research

Thompson's research has focused on the neurobiology of language, particularly sentence processing in both neurotypical adults and those with aphasia resulting from stroke and neurodegenerative disease.

Thompson has used both linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of normal language processing to predict breakdown and recovery patterns in patients and to develop treatment for people with sentence processing impairments associated with aphasia. Her research team has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and on-line eye tracking to investigate normal and disordered neurocognitive processing mechanisms and to chart patterns of language recovery.

Thompson and her team found that healthy people engage a predominantly left hemisphere (LH) neural network for sentence processing. In large-scale aphasia treatment studies, they found that when the LH is damaged, right hemisphere (RH) regions are recruited to support treatment-induced recovery of sentence comprehension and production, attesting to RH neuroplasticity and adaptivity in rebuilding language processes. Her group also has identified critical brain tissue associated with sentence processing using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in people with aphasia.

Thompson coined the Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis (ASCH) and the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (CATE), developed Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF) for sentence processing impairments in aphasia, and identified behavioral and neural variables associated with language recovery and neuroplasticity, including white matter tract integrity and neural activation during rest (resting-state fMRI). She also developed diagnostic tools for assessing language disorders in adults with aphasia, including the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS), the Northwestern Anagram Test (NAT), the Northwestern Naming Battery (NNB), the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI), and a method for analyzing narrative language: the Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis System (NNLA). She has authored over 200 journal articles and 40 book chapters.