Dafna Palti

Postdoctoral Associate

Office: 46-4033F

Telephone: (617) 324-1089

Email: dafna at mit dot edu

I started out in Tel Aviv University , Israel , where I completed my M.A. and my Ph.D. studies in psychology. I also spent the last year of my Ph.D. at the Gabrieli lab, as a Fulbright visiting student. My main research interests are in the neuronal aspects of language processing and language evolution. In my doctoral research I used brain imaging and behavioral measurements to explore the neuronal relationship between the motor and the language brain systems during language processing. Currently I am involved in imaging projects that focus on the neuronal correlates of reading. In this work, we wish to better understand the brain mechanisms that are involved in visual word recognition and how they fail to develop in dyslexia.

selected publications

Palti, D., and Hadar, U. (in press). Functional Imaging of the hand motor cortex during the performance of linguistic tasks. To appear in: E. Morsella (Ed.), Expressing Oneself / Expressing One's Self: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert M. Krauss . Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.

Kiperwasser, S.*, Palti, D .*, Neufeld, M., Ben-Shachar, M., Andelman, F., Fried, I. , Korczyn, A., and Hendler, T. (*- equal contributors) . (in press). Long-distance neuronal plasticity in the hemisphere of left epileptic focus: Evidence from fMRI based language representations. Acta Neurologica Scandinavica.

Palti, D ., Ben Shachar, M., Hendler, T., and Hadar, U. (2007). Neural correlates of semantic and morphological processing of Hebrew nouns and verbs. Human Brain Mapping, 28(4):303-14 .

Shetreet, E., Palti, D ., Friedmann, N., and Hadar, U. (2007). Cortical representation of verb processing in sentence comprehension: Number of Complements, Argument Structure and Subcategorization. Cerebral cortex , 17(8):1958-69 .

Ben - Shachar, M., Palti, D ., and Grodzinsky, Y. (2004). Neuroimaging of syntactic processing: deriving linguistically based generalizations. Neuroimage, 21(4):1320-36.

Selected Talks and Conference Presentations

Palti, D ., and Hadar, U. (2006). Premotor activity during language production of motor and non-motor contents: preliminary results. Presented at the Isra eli meeting of Human Brain Mapping, Tel Aviv, Israel .

Palti D. , Ben-Moshe, Z., and Hadar, U. (2006). Cortical dissociation within the motor system during generation of words with increasing motor content. Poster presented at the Human Brain Mapping Annual Meeting, Florence , Italy .

Palti, D ., and Hadar, U. (2005). Talking Hands: The relationship between language processing and the control of hand movement. Presented at the Israeli meeting of Human Brain Mapping, Tel Aviv, Israel .

Palti, D ., and Hadar, U. (2005). Talking hands: Cortical activation in dominant and non-dominant hand regions during language tasks. Poster presented at the Human Brain Mapping Annual Meeting, Toronto , Canada .

Palti, D ., Hendler, T., and Hadar, U. (2003). The Involvement of semantic factors in grammatical gender retrieval: An fMRI study in Hebrew. Presented at the Human Brain Mapping Annual Meeting, New York , NY .