My primary research interest is in the mental representation of language, in particular the differences between the right hemisphere (RH) and left hemisphere (LH) capacities to represent semantic and syntactic knowledge. To approach these problems, I use callosotomy (or split- brain) patients and patients with focal lesions following stroke, as well as normal subjects in divided field studies. There are two primary projects in my laboratory at present. The first project uses psycholinguistic paradigms from the discourse processing literature to investigate the neural basis of the role of event perception in the development of the discourse model. The second project investigates the development of intensive implicit intervention techniques in improving recovery from aphasia after stroke. Changes pre- and post-training are tracked behaviorally and where possible with structural and functional MRI. The long term goal is to better predict the most efficient intervention techniques based on scan data and error patterns early in recovery.

Teaching Interests:
Psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology

Publications:

Baynes K, JC Eliassen, HL Lutsep, and MS Gazzaniga. 1998. Interhemispheric integration masks modular organization of cognitive systems . Science. 280:902-905

Long, D.L., Baynes, K., and Prat, C.S. 2005. The propositional structure of discourse in the two cerebral hemispheres. Brain and Language, 95, 383-394.

Baynes, K. and Gazzaniga, M.S. 2005. Lateralization of language: Toward a biologically based model of language. Linguistic Review, 22, 303-326.

Davis, C.H., Harrington, G. and Baynes, K. 2006. Intensive semantic intervention in fluent aphasia: A pilot study with fMRI. 2006. Aphasiology, 20, 59-83.